Absolute Zero Read online

  Absolute Zero

  a novel

  by Max Lagno

  Adam Online

  Book#1

  Magic Dome Books

  Adam Online

  Book # 1: Absolute Zero

  Copyright © Max Lagno 2019

  Cover Art © Vladimir Manyukhin 2019

  English translation copyright © Alix Merlin Williamson 2019

  Editor: Irene Woodhead

  Published by Magic Dome Books, 2019

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: 978-80-7619-021-4

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to the shop and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is entirely a work of fiction.

  Any correlation with real people or events is coincidental.

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  Table of Contents:

  Chapter 1. Death and Oblivion

  Chapter 2. Good Time of Day

  Chapter 3. First Damage

  Chapter 4. Damned Angels

  Chapter 5. From the Sky to the Earth

  Chapter 6. All and Nothing

  Chapter 7. Collapse Shmollapse

  Chapter 8. New Victim Leaderboard

  Chapter 9. Teenagers Online

  Chapter 10. Foul Insinuations

  Chapter 11. Cortaperillas

  Chapter 12. All Thumbs

  Chapter 13. Arachnophilia

  Chapter 14. The Dichotomy of Luck

  Chapter 15. Numbers After the Decimal

  Chapter 16. Corridor Shooter

  Chapter 17. Non-Game Character

  Chapter 18. Pick Your Poison

  Chapter 19. More Wood

  Chapter 20. Monetization

  Chapter 21. Enemy at the Gates

  Chapter 22. About Face at the Gate

  Chapter 23. I will find you and kill you

  Chapter 24. Pistol Tricks

  Chapter 25. 30 Seconds Remaining

  Chapter 26. The Dark Side

  Chapter 27. Three-Ring Circus

  Chapter 28. Last Chance

  Chapter 29. Guild Wars

  Chapter 30. Egg-Shaped White Thing

  Chapter 31. Surgical Precision

  Chapter 32. Apple Innovations

  Chapter 33. You Owe Three Dollars

  Chapter 34. 3buck$

  Chapter 35. Anti-Social Element

  Chapter 36. My Dear People

  Chapter 37. Last Two Rounds in the Box

  Chapter 38. Cool_Name

  Chapter 39. Red Cloak

  Chapter 40. Trouble with the Law

  Chapter 41. Trouble with the Outlaws

  Chapter 1. Death and Oblivion

  A RED MESSAGE appeared on the projection screen:

  Radiological hazard. K-coefficient — 20%%%%%

  Assessing radiological environment...

  At that the system froze, displaying a spinning wheel. Either the readings were too complex, or the on-board computer had failed.

  My traveling companion put aside the tablet on which he had been watching idiotic stand-up shows for the whole flight. For a full hour and a half, I'd been forced to listen to loud cackling and jokes in Tatar, Russian and Chinese. They were just as bad in every language. I even started getting annoyed that the cabin's soundproofing shielded us from the sound of the rotors. Their whirring would have been better than those attempts at humor.

  My traveling companion stood up and opened a cupboard. “Size?”

  I stood up too and grabbed a radiation suit for myself.

  He smirked. “You soldiers give yourselves away with details like that.” “I don't know what you mean.”

  “The fact that you didn't trust me with the choice.”

  I unfastened the suit. Within twenty seconds, exceeding the standard time requirement, I’d put it on and checked it was functioning.

  “My dad taught me not to trust strangers. Sorry, but this is the first time I’ve met you,” I sat back down, keeping the controls in view.

  My traveling companion followed my gaze. “And you always keep an eye on the controls.”

  “Maybe I’ve never seen a combat helicopter piloting itself.”

  “You’ve seen it all,” he zipped up his suit (almost making the standard time). “And you know full well that if we’re shot down now, your best bet is taking the controls.”

  “Isn’t the chopper equipped with reactive defenses?”

  “Of course, the defenses will shoot down a missile in flight, but that’s why they have gamma emitters built in. After the missile explodes, the EM pulse knocks the computer out of action. It won’t be able to perform an emergency landing. That’s why you’re sitting there ready to jump into the pilot’s seat. Anyone who’s served knows that.”

  By the last sentence, I was listening through the earphones of my radiation suit. I wanted to answer that the on-board computer would crash even without an EM pulse, but I kept silent. The conversation was pointless enough as it was. We were swapping obvious facts, feeling each other out to find out who was hiding more about themselves.

  He picked up a tablet and brought up the map on the projector panel. “Beginning descent.”

  The symbol of our Mi-200 SU moved through an area crosshatched in yellow and black. Formally, the land belonged to Chinese Kazakhstan, an autonomous republic incorporated within China. In practice, it belonged to nobody. It had been several decades since the last nuclear bombing. The place would be highly radioactive for centuries to come.

  There was no better place to set up an unregistered access point to Adam Online. Even if they followed the signal, it would lead them to the edge of a deserted zone. Then no electronics would determine the precise location of the pod: too much interference.

  The map disappeared from the projector panel and the lower camera came up on the screen. It showed the remains of a ruined town, with broken streets like cut veins. The sun had not yet risen, so the camera was in night mode, making the ruins seem even more lifeless.

  “Don’t tell me the pod is on the surface.”

  “Relax, bro,” my companion replied. “It’s so deep underground, you can hear Satan knocking from hell.”

  * * *

  The beginnings of dawn barely tinted the lifeless sky. The city ruins drowned in blue. I stood on the ground by the helicopter’s open cargo hatch.

  “Look over there, under the bricks,�
� my companion said from the depths of the cabin.

  People like him were called “landlords.” They owned “landings,” buildings containing unregistered log-in systems for Adam Online. And people like me, who wanted to steal their way into the virtual world, were called “squatters.” Or, considering the quantum nature of the extranet — QUANTers.

  Beneath the pile of bricks was the end of a hose with a fluid transfer mechanism. The hose pulled easily from a hole in the ground. The landlord brought a second, similar hose out of the cabin. We connected the ends to the two tanks of dissociative electrolytes occupying half the helicopter’s cargo compartment. On the sides of the tanks, apart from inscriptions in Tatar, Chinese and English, were stickers bearing the crest of the Kazan People’s Republic.

  The contents of the tanks began to pump into underground vats.

  “Grab your things and follow me,” the landlord told me.

  I took my backpack from the helicopter cabin and got my pistol from the side pocket.

  “Who are you planning to shoot out here?” my escort asked over the radio. “Everything’s under control.”

  Hesitating a little, I put the pistol back. I placed my backpack in a protective bag. The backpack was shielded against radiation too, but I didn’t want to risk it. If my injection syringes took a dose of radiation, I’d never return from the taharration.

  I threw the backpack onto my shoulders and hurried to the ruined store building. The helicopter remained on the town square, surrounded by an overgrowth of yellow thorns, its cargo doors wide open, the hoses stretching out like lines for an intensive care patient. No wonder it was such a mess inside.

  The landlord and I climbed through broken windows. The store was completely overgrown inside with thorns and twisted trees reminiscent of saxaul[1]. The scraps of an ancient coca cola advert hung limp. A cloud of insects rose into the air. There were no animals in the radioactive zone, but there were bugs, hornets and butterflies aplenty, pollinating who knows what and how.

  Walking through a swarm of gnats as if through mist, we reached the wall. The landlord cleared away some creeping plants and opened a disintegrating door, revealing a stone wall. He grabbed a protruding stone and pulled at the wall. It opened like an ordinary door. Behind it, a dark corridor with steps leading down.

  “Took me and my partners three months to build this landing,” the landlord said, walking down the stairs. “Then I lived here alone for a month with the building droids. Cobbled together the infrastructure for connecting to the extranet.”

  A bulb came on in the corridor, illuminating the cage of a lift. The landlord tapped a code into a tablet to unlock the doors.

  I looked back. The insects had settled back down onto the branches. Pink clouds hung in the triangle of the broken storefront as if in a picture frame. My last glimpse of the real world for a long time. Even if it was a sad world with high background radiation, like these abandoned lands of Chinese Kazakhstan.

  * * *

  We took off our suits and left them in the airlock after we went through the radiation scrubber. The landlord walked into the dark emptiness and pulled a switch with a loud crash.

  The lights came on slowly, those that came on at all. Pumps and air vents spluttered into action along with them. The air in the underground room filled with dust.

  “See, brother, the air is filtered and purified,” he barely held back the urge to sneeze. “We... we refine oxygen from water we get from a well. The hydrogen left over from producing oxygen goes to the power system. Like on a lunar station, bro.”

  “What’s up with the electricity?” I pointed at the blinking lights. “My pod going to work like that?”

  “Please. The computer and pod have a separate generator, and the battery can last two months in emergency mode.”

  Along one wall stood two gyroscopic cells; orbs of yellowed plastic three meters in diameter. The brand looked to be LG. Hmm. Who needed gyrorbs these days, apart from the underage and the crippled? And besides that, why keep them in a landing? Medical cupboards and valves for dissociative electrolytes lined the other walls. Building droids gathered dust in the corners.

  There was a separate cabin at the room’s center. The landing itself. It stood out with its bleach-white cleanliness. Thick air ducts stretched up to the ceiling. I looked through the square window and examined the taharration pod covered in a plastic sheet. An old droid started crawling into the room.

  A message appeared on its screen.

  Sterilization: 34%.

  “What do you think?”

  “Pod looks great.”

  The landlord approached the door of the landing. At its center was a projection screen. He waved his hand, opening the computer interface. I approached and called up the system information.

  — NELLY —

  Quantum Computation Platform

  20445 MgQ-bits (Last date checked: never)

  Model Name: QCP

  Model Identifier: QCP 6.2

  System Release: 100.07

  (Server upgrade unavailable. Please check firewall settings. Reconnecting 3… 2… 1…)

  Hardware UUID: 8D9DBA65-21FA-5629-8A59-46ECF5708B77

  …

  “Six-two?” I exclaimed. “Seriously? This computer is ten years old.”

  The landlord took offense as usual. “Look here, brother. How old are you in standard years?”

  “Thirty-six.”

  “Why were you sent for this, instead of a twenty-year old kid? Right, because you’re experienced. A major? A captain? Maybe even a general, huh? You guys in Moscovian Rus rank up pretty quick.”

  “What are you driving at?”

  “New doesn’t always mean better. And ‘new’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘reliable.’ Alice here has sent so many people to the other side that you have nothing to fear, she’s the most experienced around. She’s amassed so many human consciousnesses that...”

  “Computers don’t keep binary arrays of human consciousness.”

  “Eh, nah, bro, even the scientists that invented taharration technology can’t explain all that confusing quantum stuff.”

  “They can, you just don’t understand it. No offense. Never mind, relax, six-two it is.”

  I decided not to annoy the landlord. For the next few months, my body would be floating in a pod of dissociative fluid. If the landlord decided to throw it in the garbage, my consciousness would have nowhere to come back to.

  The droid signaled the end of the sterilization process and exited the pod room.

  The landlord pointed out a cabin in the corner. “It’s time, brother. There’s a shower and a changing room in there. I’ll prep the injection.”

  I nodded toward the backpack. “I have my own. In the pocket next to the pistol.

  “See, that’s just what I’m talking about, brother... You won’t even trust me with the injections. Why do you guys — CIA, NSA, FSB, or whoever — even need us landlords? Even ones as high-class as me.”

  I shrugged, entered the cabin and started to get undressed. The landlord droned on behind the door, rummaging through my backpack. “Why, I ask? When the details of the hundred-year story of the Mentors broke, you all bolted into the extranet to find them. That’s no secret. They talk about it in all the Rims. The one who finds the Mentors may be able to achieve digital immortality. So you hide from each other. Try to infiltrate the extranet under the guise of petty criminals. But you can’t fool me. I’m no tech support droid, heh.”

  I turned the valves. The pipes coughed, spluttered out some dust onto me.

  “Oh, that’s right, I forgot. There’s a pump on the wall there, pump the water yourself. Couldn’t make a normal water pipe. Like I said, was building on my own.”

  * * *

  Taharration[2], the copying of human consciousness, was a complex operation. The human body was immersed in a pod of dissociative electrolytes and put into stasis. All life functions were frozen. The dissociative molecules melded into every cell of the body,
creating its digital copy, which was then scanned by the QCP, the quantum computing platform. A virtual model of the individual, sometimes called a ‘binary array’ (although there was no binary code involved) was processed and forwarded to the extranet. Usually to Adam Online, the largest virtual world.

  Adam Online was better than reality in all respects. The air, the food, the entertainment. The work paid better and was more fun. After all, a quest to seek out some item was more alluring than the manufacturing of real items at a real conveyor belt in a real factory.

  According to the statistics, over seventy percent of the planet’s population was in stasis at any given time. They floated in pods or in their own homes, or in a district MTC department: a Municipal Taharration Cluster, a pathway to Adam Online for the poor. A building full of tightly packed torpedoes, in each a naked and bald human being.

  People lived in a virtual reality, earning virtual millions, or roaming the endless zones of Adam Online, imitating trade, and earning billions through it. They traded user-made skins, upgrades, weaponry, and gear.

  The place used fake money in a fake economy, creating real added value that could be used to produce an even greater number of artificial objects: new skins, new weapon modifications, new structures. The gigantic flywheel of the digital economy encompassed almost the entire population of the planet.

  To bring it back to reality, the QCP converted the consciousness back again and rewrote it into the body via the dissociative electrolytes. The old consciousness was overwritten with the new version, the one that had lived in Adam Online.

  Ordinary dissociative fluid preserved its conserving properties for between five and eight thousand hours, depending on its quality. If one failed to return to the body in that time, then the decay process began and prevented reintegration. High-quality dissociative fluid, such as the fluid in which my body now floated, could support stasis for almost a year.