Please Be Pattern A
As I mentioned before, EFD was packed with a truly staggering variety of things. Diverse content, diverse builds, a diverse player base — and, as a natural consequence, every conceivable mechanic had sunk its teeth into the game and run through it from end to end.
That was how countless players, lured in by EFD's peculiar charm, became Prisoners. They threw themselves in, explored, died and failed, lived and succeeded, and then did it all over again. They went completely insane, howling that the game was delicious because you died.
I know the feeling. I was one of them.
Which is why, even in those half-joking debates, we always carved out a single exception for EFD.
Whenever that tired old prompt floated up — reincarnating into some random game world versus reincarnating into the world of EFD — we all said the same thing, with one voice.
Clunk. Thud.
Especially now that it had become my reality, it was even less of a joke.
First: there's one of them.
I frowned, just a little, trying to separate the volume of the noise from the interval at which it carried. The distance from the room I was hiding in to the source was roughly twenty to thirty meters. The interior made everything hum and bounce, though, so the real margin of error could have been wider than that.
I reversed my grip on the knife, pressed myself flat against the doorframe, and listened again. There's a rule that holds true in every game where audio actually matters: sound itself is information. Which meant I couldn't afford to give the other side a single scrap of it — and I couldn't afford to miss even the smallest scrap they gave me. It was the kind of extreme staring contest that set up all the time.
When I'd played EFD, the other side had been an AI. Learn the patterns, abuse the gimmicks, and I could usually force myself into the better position. This was different.
It could be a human, same as me. Or…
A handful of primordials that fit the backdrop and conditions of the Darkzone I'd been dropped into flickered through my head. Personally, I would have preferred it not be that. Unfortunately, nothing I was hearing made a convincing case for a fellow human being.
Clunk. Creeeak.
The footsteps are irregular, and it keeps colliding with everything around it. Ten meters further from human. A long, grinding scrape. It's generating unnatural noise without the slightest care. Another hundred meters. A wet sniff. A sliding drag. Another sniff. No human wearing a specialized respirator leans that hard on their sense of smell. A million light-years from human, then.
I picked the largest of the unidentified medicine bottles out of a drawer in what I took to be someone's private lab. The glass hadn't been blinded black, so it wasn't worth anything — but the lettering was still smeared into sludge, and there was no way to tell what was actually inside.
Each filter was good for about two hours. I'd been in here maybe ten minutes, and I hadn't touched a contaminant yet, so the number tracked.
I wrapped my hand in a scrap of old clothing lying around the room, grabbed the bottle's cap, and twisted it open hard. The filter reading started dropping in plain sight, and fast.
Contaminant. Called it.
I rolled the leaking bottle out into the corridor and let it clatter away, a neat little rattle of glass on tile. It went exactly toward the entrance I'd come in through. Then I pulled the chemical-stained clothing up over my upper body.
Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud!
From a long way off came the sound of something that had just registered a sudden change in the smell of the air, and it was coming down the corridor very, very fast. I could feel a faint vibration through the floor. Whatever it was, it had some bulk to it.
A crash. A crack. The bright shatter of glass.
Halfway down the hall, a half-open door of reinforced glass came apart with a violence that rang through the whole floor. It lasted only a fraction of a second, but through the gap in my own doorway I saw something whip past.
Fuck. It was a Growler after all.
The Growler. A primordial that showed up constantly in Darkzones short on artificial light — a kind neighbor, really, always happy to teach players what true cooperative play looked like. Decline to cooperate, and that thing would physically cave your skull in.
It sniffed hard, then rolled a low growl around in its throat. Having charged all this way on the back of that filthy smell and found nothing waiting outside the entrance, it started pacing, rumbling at the empty air. I used the opening. Holding the soaked clothing out so my own scent wouldn't bleed into its nose, I slipped out of the room.
A Growler was a bizarre primordial: a frame pushing three meters, limbs packed with dense muscle, and a relatively soft belly that sloshed when it moved. Its weak points were supposed to be almost everything that wasn't an arm or a leg. That information was worthless to me. I had no firepower and no numbers.
What I had to care about right now was simpler. Growlers lived in the dark. They didn't have eyes.
A growl scraped raw out of its throat, close enough to sit right between my shoulder blades. Hiding in the room out of fear wouldn't save me, and charging its back with no plan wouldn't either. Keep hiding and my scent — which did not belong in this place — would light up on its radar anyway. Charge in like a hero and I'd be a one-bite meal. Either way, I was done.
Fortunately, ditching Growlers is something I've already gotten as familiar with as a person can get.
It leaned so hard on smell and hearing that one big stimulus was usually enough to lead it around by the nose. Killing one was hard. Losing one, or dropping it into a trap, was easy. And more to the point, I was not about to abandon a honey of a farm over a single Growler.
Now, if there were two of them, that would be a different—
A sniff, wet and huge, right on top of me. I locked up like plaster.
Another sniff. A physiological double-check, as if it still wasn't sure about the strange smell hanging in the air. I lifted the chemical-soaked clothing in one hand as carefully as I could, praying the fabric wouldn't whisper.
Maybe it caught the shift. A new face shouldered out of the dark at the corridor corner and flared its nostrils again. Sniff. That was the third time.
A primordial's alert level breaks down into three stages, broadly speaking. One: detection. Two: confirmation. Three: judgment. Once it hits stage three, a handful of conditions decide what it does next.
If it can't confirm an enemy — a player — is actually there, it drops back into its original behavior pattern and wanders off on its own business. That's Pattern A. If it can confirm an enemy is there, it slams straight into the reaction stage and charges that position no matter what's standing on it, swinging for blood. That's Pattern B.
The one I'd already peeled off behind me had shown me Pattern B. So what about this one?
Please be A. Please be A. Please be A.
I'd burned my youth on games and come out of a middling university with so few A's I could count them on one hand. In this particular moment, I wanted an A more desperately than anyone alive.
A low, considering growl.
As of today, you are no longer a cozy game.
I didn't hesitate. I flung the soaked clothing into that hideous face and threw myself forward in the same motion.
The latecomer's extra-spicy punch slammed down on the spot I'd just vacated. The smooth tile floor came apart so completely there was nothing left to recognize. A Growler's strength sat at the level where it could grab a person and simply tear them in half; get caught or get hit and you were probably dead on the spot. Even a graze is a crit! might as well have been coined for this thing.
I let my guard down because Growlers aren't pack hunters. I guess it isn't completely the same as the game. Or maybe the tenth-anniversary mega-update had patched the hell out of them. The shockwave rolled up my spine and little fragments of tile leapt and clattered, and the whole combination put a cold line down my back as I used the centrifugal snap of the roll to kick off the floor and sprint.
The original plan had been to make no noise at all until I was out. Aggro changed the math.
I still have to farm. I still have to lose them. I cannot start a Wave. And I have to walk out of here with all my limbs attached.
The difficulty had jumped from baby-mode to super-inferno so fast my head spun. I still had the pride of a ten-year veteran, though.
Two savage howls tore out of the corridor behind me at the same time and rang through the building like a struck bell. The moment one of them started attacking, the other had keyed off it and come along for the ride. Sure enough, they threw themselves after me, pounding the floor in the direction I'd fled. Growlers were primordials with absurdly overdeveloped limb muscle; once they committed to a charge, they hit with all the dignity of a freight truck.
The dust and cement powder hanging in the air have mostly killed their noses, but their hearing and their sense of touch are still sharp. So give them something to confuse.
Vibration running along a wall, noise spreading wide — all of it made a beautiful trail for a hunter like a Growler. I rounded the corner and started grabbing every fixture in sight, hurling them into the walls or kicking them over as I moved. A gurney that had once carried someone went over with a crash; I vaulted it and kept going. A wheelchair sat right in front of me. I snatched it, shoved it ahead of me down the tiles, and at the fork in the corridor flung it hard the other way.
One of the Growlers, having no eyes and therefore no idea the hall even split, drove itself straight into the wall. It howled, shaking its head like it could rattle the pain out. The wheelchair kept sliding, a smooth hiss over tile, and I ran like hell for the emergency stairwell at the far end. The Growler seemed to have a genuinely miserable time telling the two noises apart — and then it came after me anyway. A genuine RNG-fucked game.
Still. One of them went the other way.
The second Growler, arriving late, planted its head in the same wall and then took off after the sliding wheelchair. Apparently it didn't fancy a sweaty, filthy bidding war over prey with a colleague.
I kicked through the stairwell door and dropped toward the basement, where the noise was even worse. I took the steel stairs so fast I nearly rolled an ankle; if this had been my original body, I would have rolled it for sure. A step behind me, the Growler smashed the stairwell door to pieces and tried to ram that entire bulk through the narrow gap in the steel. I could have cried, I was so grateful for how big it was.
A low, steady hum rose to meet me. I made it into the basement generator room while the emergency generator was still running, and I made it in time.
Fuel can.
The five-liter canister sitting carelessly beside the emergency generator looked like a god. It was also pretty expensive. Some of the materials the Darkzone produced were extremely useful to the government and the corporations on the outside — fuel, batteries, medicine — and the lore was that they ran at a much higher efficiency than the identical items in the real world, so they settled at a very healthy price.
Anyway. I was going to have to liquidate this expensive canister at a fire-sale price. Even as I opened the cap, my hands shook with how much it pained me.
In your next life, at least do me a favor and come back as a nice, well-behaved twenty-liter.
Those things were actually expensive.
Pop.