Where Do You Live?
The first build I took into a match came back with results that were more satisfying than I had any right to expect.
Just as I'd figured, the traits meshed together like interlocking gears and did their jobs beautifully. There were shortcomings, of course, but those were problems I could patch later.
What pleased me most was the Perimeter Watch trait.
I'd had my doubts, if I'm being honest. Two fans will make a room cooler — that much is true — but they will not make it twice as cool. I couldn't be sure how much Perimeter Watch would actually help until I used it.
Playing the game, I found out for certain. It wasn't merely helpful. It filled in what I'd been missing as perfectly as a lost puzzle piece snapping into place.
No matter how well you read an opponent's movement, unless you've got actual future sight, you cannot account for everything. And since bullets spray in every direction, perfectly dodging them is, for all practical purposes, impossible.
The reason I can still say this is simple. The Perimeter Watch trait itself tells you which direction a bullet is coming from. More precisely, all it does is paint the point the enemy is aiming at in red — but that alone was enough.
It wasn't perfect, of course. No matter how fast I moved, I couldn't outrun a bullet. This was only ever about seeing the line of fire and getting out of the way in advance. A shot fired before I noticed it would still catch me completely exposed.
Even so, I was more than satisfied. I wasn't trying to build some invincible character that could handle every situation, after all.
My record sat at eight wins and two losses. Not every match was a deathmatch about wiping the enemy team, so that result was inevitable. No matter how well I played, if the team couldn't back me up, it was all for nothing.
I'd need to tweak the build a little, but the traits themselves were more fun than I'd expected. At first I'd worried they might undercut the realism. Instead they gave everything a distinctive flavor I actually liked.
Then a thought occurred to me. If I used the traits well enough... couldn't I slaughter people with nothing but a melee weapon?
On a real battlefield, anyone who tried that would be called a lunatic. But this was a game. Games exist to be enjoyed. I didn't see a problem.
...Once the thought was there, acting on it didn't take long.
Unknown charges the enemy in front of her like a thrown spear. The rifle aimed at her chest answers in kind, coughing a stream of fire as if it refuses to be outdone.
A tactical knife is a short blade worn at the hip. The reach is miserable, which means the odds of getting turned into a beehive before you ever close the gap are excellent. The rifleman does not doubt his victory for a second. In a world drowning in firearms, bringing a melee weapon to a gunfight is absurd on its face. The other player isn't an idiot — who in their right mind just stands there and lets someone sprint at them in the open?
That is why melee weapons almost never see use except as a prop for tea-bagging a corpse. For all the varieties the game offers, they are basically unpopular. Between a ranged weapon and a close-range one, the gap is the difference between a child and an adult. That is what the rifleman believes. The lunatic charging him now will die without even managing a proper counter.
Unknown does not stop. There is not a flicker of hesitation in her, as if the win is already hers.
A round kisses past her left cheek. One lucky dodge does not change the math. There are plenty of bullets still in the air, and he has dumped a full magazine — there is no world in which she walks away from this.
Unknown adjusts her grip on the tactical knife. She is going to attack. In any other situation he would have swapped to a sidearm, but the woman coming at him is not holding a gun. Convinced she cannot possibly reach him, he starts a reload in the open, completely exposed.
A single round catches the tip of the knife and ricochets away with a sharp metallic scream. Before the shock can even land, Unknown fills his vision, driving the blade in like a thrust meant to punch through an eye.
He throws himself sideways to evade. His body does not listen. He is mid-reload, defenseless, and the limbs simply will not obey.
Unknown's knife goes through the side of his neck like a harpoon. She twists the blade as she wrenches it free of the throat it has just transfixed, and a body that has already forgotten how to stand dumps itself onto the floor in a rush of blood.
Unknown's shoulders tremble with the thrill of the hunt. For a moment she looks less like a player than a monster that has come looking for blood.
Games are played by people, which means the skill gap between individuals is a fact of life. Some players are good. Some players are not. The ones just starting out get called newbies. The ones who have poured years into a title are usually called veterans — fossils, if you want to be unkind.
To a newbie, a veteran's play does not even look like the same game. They move as if the physics engine is a polite suggestion, and they take the other team apart for sport. You admire it. You also catch yourself wondering whether you could ever do that.
A game is fun when you are good at it and infuriating when you are not, so of course everyone wants to be good. Getting there takes time. A lot of time. And there are people who invest that time and still have nothing to show for it.
Which is why, every so often, someone reaches for a shortcut. The shortcut in question is unauthorized software. Hacks, in other words. They will give you veteran-grade play without the years, and some of them will even let you rewrite the game's own judgments until the match behaves the way you want.
That is how hacks became the poster child for ruining a game. Naturally the developers build a shield, and naturally the programmers build a spear that punches through it. A war of spears and shields, forever.
...The reason I am suddenly giving this lecture is that I am, at this very moment, being accused of hacking.
I have no idea how it got to this point. All I did was play the game like a normal person.
My eyes drop to the lower left of the screen. The chat window — built so players can talk to each other — is filling with slurs as fast as the letters can appear.
I couldn't even pretend their reaction made no sense. Last of Quantum might have been a game, but it was a game built around realism. You could tell that much from how stubbornly physical the interactions were.
The old me would never have imagined dodging bullets. Lee Harin's innate talent made it possible. Aside from the one time six of them piled on me at once, I barely had any deaths to my name. That said enough. Of course they thought I was hacking. Even I had caught myself wondering, mid-match, whether I was actually the one playing.
That didn't mean I wasn't pissed. I was just a regular user trying to enjoy a game. The least I could do was push back.
Everything I had done existed inside the game's own systems. Dodging incoming fire. Landing shots at range. Stringing offense and defense together until it flowed like water. All of it was just applying tools the game already gave you.
The idea that if you can't do something, nobody else can either — I couldn't think of a cheaper, more self-absorbed way to look at the world.
My teeth ground together, a small ugly sound.
Watching them hide behind anonymity and swear like horses that had slipped the bit, I could feel the heat climbing just from reading the lines. Fine, think I'm hacking. Why the hell were these nobodies dragging someone's parents into it?
The parents they meant were Lee Harin's family. But I was Lee Harin now, and it landed like they were cursing mine.
Before I knew it, I was already typing a reply.
Heat crawled up my face. I must have been more worked up than I realized, because even I could tell the chat I was punching out was embarrassingly childish. I kept throwing out lines of every flavor, and then, out of nowhere, a cold little spike of anxiety landed.
"I'm not actually going to get banned... right?"
Bans were handled by a program, and programs were not perfect. If enough hack reports stacked up, you could eat a suspension even if you had never touched a cheat in your life.
While I was off in my own head, the other team finished reading my messages and went right back to flooding the window with slurs. And in the middle of that mess, a line I could not parse at all.
Every single message had been written to get a rise out of me. There was nothing in the window that wasn't garbage.
"Ah, for fuck's sake."
The curse came out of me on its own. I didn't have a single ally left in the match. Even my own team, the people I was supposed to be coordinating with, had already branded me a cheater.
I could feel it as I typed — standing alone against a chat that was nothing but raw, ugly abuse didn't mean a thing. Call it a keyboard war if you want. Once the numbers go against you, there is no winning.
And my messages had the opposite of the effect I'd wanted. The people in chat lit up like they'd been handed a toy and started tearing into me for sport.
Just keeping my eyes on the chat was enough to set my hands shaking.
A dull tap. Then silence.
The floor took the hit with a crack that jumped through the room. I had been trying to type, my fingers had started missing keys, and before I knew it I had slammed my fist into the ground.
I couldn't hold it in. I hit enter.