Dark Fate, Chapter 80

Chapter 80 – Recruiting

(Conference Room, Atlanta Marriot Marquis, Atlanta, GA)

Ellie Pace, known online as QT3.14159, or just QT, for short, frowned as she looked around the conference room. There were at least fifty people in the room, all of them aged between 16 and 25. All of them gamers. She even recognized many of the faces from different tournaments that she’d been in, before the Apocalypse.

She was, after all, one of the top players when it came to PvP flight simulator games. Not the very top of the ladder, sure, but she was easily in the top ten percent, nationwide. Adjust up and down for different titles, but the basics were still the same. Just like how a Call of Duty player wouldn’t be a helpless noob if they stepped into another FPS game, even if they’d still have to work to get good. Sure, you had to learn the fine points of the game’s systems to be in the top tier, but the base level of skill transferred over, and made that learning process quicker. Well, unless the new game had some kind of fucked up control scheme that was totally non-intuitive. That was always a pain.

Regardless, if she looked around the room, she could see several elites. Most of them fliers, like her, but there were exceptions. The one she noticed straight-away was R34P3R. Sure, he was a top-tier FPS player, but he was better known for his organizational skills in building orgs. He was a Trainer, who got paid good money to find raw talents, and get them to work together, as a team. He had literally built championship arena teams from scratch!

That led QT to one conclusion. Someone was putting together an org. The NDA she had to sign to get into the meeting proved that it was something corporate. However, it didn’t feel like it was some kind of closed alpha or stress test to try and make sure a game would be able to support a competitive scene, and it was too many all at once to be a new IP that wanted player feedback before going too far into development. And with R34P3R here? This was definitely putting together an org.

Which was a good thing, because the tournament scene had been absolute trash, ever since the Apocalypse. First, you had a whole bunch of people who died, or lived in areas where the internet wasn’t always working anymore, due to monsters. And then, there was the fact that traveling wasn’t always entirely safe. It was getting better, lately, but there was still a ways to go before she’d consider a road trip. At least the airlines had found a way to ward planes to keep attacks down. Even when you had monsters that literally knocked planes out of the sky, flying was still the safest way to travel.

Of course, it could just be that the big flying monsters didn’t reproduce as quickly as the land-based ones, and colliding with a passenger jet did enough damage that the monsters didn’t survive the crash, or were crippled and picked off by scavengers. One rumor on the internet said that someone in New York had just put together a package that would protect planes from random encounters. One of the airlines installed it, and saw an 80% drop in attacks the first week, with it dropping by 97% by the end of the second week, as more planes rolled out the system.

Anyway, the whole e-sports scene had been in serious upheaval, and this could be the first org to actually start up, post-Apocalypse. If a new org was starting up, then that meant that they had some hints that tournaments were coming back, right? Speaking honestly, she’d really like to get back to virtual flying for a living, instead of having to scrape by, killing monsters for coin, because grinding sucked, and sucked hard. She wasn’t a JRPG player, damnit!

There was a stir as a man in what looked like leather armor walked up to the front of the room, with a scythe of all things. Was this some kind of cosplay? No, wait. That stuff looked too ‘real’ to be fake. That meant he was one of the monster-hunters or adventurers, then, surely. What was going on here?

She focused on the man as he raised his hands for quiet, and had to admit that she liked what she saw. She wasn’t normally one to go in for eye candy alone, of course. If she wanted a serious gamer as a companion, she had to accept the fact that most of them did not exactly have the best hygiene or healthiest lifestyles. The odds of finding an Adonis who was into games like she was and wasn’t a total douchebag was so low that it made lootboxes look like they rained purples all day, every day, in comparison.

Granted, that was before the Apocalypse. Crazy thing about the System coming online is that it definitely made everyone more attractive. One of the gamers she’d known in San Diego had gone from a fat, pimply, greaseball to looking like a total Chad overnight. Of course, he died in the first week because having a Fighter class didn’t mean shit if you took on too many enemies in a game with no respawns.

But this guy, he was something else, entirely. If she didn’t know better, she would have sworn that he was pulled directly out of one of those sexy stories she liked to read. But was he more of an Eden Redd character, or a Neil Bimbeaux character? He didn’t have blue hair, or look like a ‘Scott’, so he certainly couldn’t be a Scottie Futch character.

She met his eyes, and it was all she could do to keep in her seat, and not just throw herself at him. Quickly scanning the audience, she noticed that more than a couple of the other women squirmed when his gaze met theirs. But what a gaze. It felt like just him looking at her would make her cum. She’d never felt anything like that before.

“Hello, and thank you for accepting this invitation.” She shuddered as he began to speak. Every word was like he was strumming some kind of chord, deep inside her. It was all she could do to actually listen to what he was saying, instead of just his voice.

“My name is Zayn Greene. I am here to offer you all the chance to be a part of something huge. I’m offering you the chance to go into space. Not just a little quick orbital hop, either. I mean actually working in space. Flying in space.”

Wait. Flying? Space? What is this? This didn’t sound like any e-sports org she’d ever heard about. And if this guy was a monster hunter… Oh. Oh, shit! But why her? Why them?

The man continued, unperturbed. “I can see by some of your reactions that you are a bit confused about this. No doubt, many of you thought this was an invitation to join some kind of new e-sports organization, perhaps a new league. Some of you may have thought that you were asked to play a closed beta of some kind, to see what kinds of problems hardcore gamers could find in a new IP. Sorry to tell you that is not the case.

“Instead, I have something bigger, better. I am offering you the chance to put your skills to the test, in a real-life scenario, flying real ships, firing real weapons. And the stakes couldn’t be higher: defending the Earth from an alien invasion.”

That was too much. That couldn’t be real. Sure, the System activating, and the fact that it happened when the tangerine dumbass went to Area 51, suggested that there were aliens. Hell, some of the System texts she’d gotten ahold of clearly said that there were aliens out there. And she’d never seen official System stuff lie before.

But actual aliens? And going out to fight them? How? And why pick a bunch of gamers for that? Wouldn’t the military be a better choice?

“How?”

She heard the word, spoken aloud, but didn’t realize that she said anything until those eyes locked on her again. Black as coal, and seeming to peer directly into her soul. She felt like she was naked under his gaze. And it didn’t displease her.

“How, is it? An excellent question, my dear. But next time, do raise your hand if you’d like to speak. That way, we can keep things moving along.” There was a general chuckle, as she blushed, but Greene didn’t stop.

“The ‘how’ is complicated. Suffice to say, I had a bit of a windfall after the System came online, and I was able to trade in some of that treasure and invest it into things that would be useful for the future. Among them, an automated digger, programmed to create a human colony on and inside the asteroid Ceres, the largest rock in the Asteroid Belt, and the resources to engage in asteroid mining.

“Another of my lucky finds was a set of plans and blueprints necessary to creating ships and defenses that would protect both Ceres and Earth. These plans included everything from little fighters all the way up to capitol ships. Money was no object, as space mining would soon pay for all of my expenses, but time? Time waits for no one.”

Another hand was raised, and Mr. Greene pointed to them. She looked, and saw that it was R34P3R. “I believe I speak for everyone here, Mr. Greene, when I ask, ‘Why us?’ Only a few, if any, of us are military. Wouldn’t it be better dealing with them?”

There were some tense looks, no doubt from people wondering whether this was all going to turn into some kind of dream, now that the base premise was questioned. Like invoking the question would ruin the chance, for everyone. But Greene just smiled.

“There are plenty of reasons. But the biggest one is that dropping some of this tech into the military’s lap would mean that they’d spend the better part of a decade deciding what they needed, and convincing the government to pay for it. And all that is assuming that they don’t just bury it, so that they don’t have to try and share the technology with the rest of the world.

“Yes, politics is a pain to deal with, even after the Apocalypse,” he shrugged, to general laughter. “But seriously, Russia and China would risk World War III if the tech was given just to the US and their allies. Plus, everyone knows that the UN just isn’t set up to handle something like alien spaceships and tech. And you can DAMN well believe I’m not trusting pure corporate interests to actually build enough of the things without a purchase order from the government to actually make a difference in a fight.”

He paused, and said, “So, that’s why ‘not military’. As for why I am looking to gamers in particular, it is because you have the honed instincts for dogfighting, with less technical limitations to unlearn. Half of you regularly play games with dogfighting in space, with realistic physics. Military pilots are used to flying jets in atmosphere. Simply put, you don’t have the pre-Apocalypse training to unlearn, and are generally open to new concepts, so long as they are adequately explained in tooltips and patch notes, meaning that we can bring you up to speed far more quickly.”

That made an awful lot of sense to QT. She knew from her games that flying in space was very different from flying in atmosphere, or even just in a gravity well. And it was true that she had developed twitch reflexes over her gaming career, being able to respond to an enemy lock-on almost before the warning sound even played. Still, it just seemed odd.

Another hand. “Why would aliens be wanting to attack Earth? How do we know they are coming?”

“The second part’s simple. I’ve already caught some of them. They made the mistake of dropping down in my back yard, and were too stupid to realize that it was going badly for them until my party and I took the ship. They were pirates and raiders, looking to capture slaves and any valuables they could get their paws on, and then sell the coordinates to Earth to anyone who would buy them.

“As for why? It is a rough universe out there, and there’s no such thing as a United Federation of Planets or your other sci-fi tropes. It is the wild west, or the age of pirates on the high seas. And any pirate lord that can capture and enslave an entire planet would be set for life.”