Island of the Wolf: A litRPG Pulp Novel (Adventure Online Book 3)

  ISLAND OF THE WOLF: A litRPG Novel

  Adventure Online Book 3

  By Isaac Stone and Timothy Mayer

  Copyright 2017 by Isaac Stone

  1.

  The wolf girl wanted to know why I hadn’t been in touch with her.

  It wasn’t the wolf girl that scared me. What scared me was the pack of twelve angry grey wolves that surrounded both of us. One wrong move and they’d tear me to pieces. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to explain your absence to an angry woman, but doing it with twelve sets of sharp teeth around you is never an easy thing to do.

  Worse if she’s your wife.

  “You no call back to me!” she screamed in between the tears. “You go and leave!”

  Little Chamita, my wife in the VR game world of Wolf Mountain, never learned to speak proper English. I still didn’t know all of the back-story to her character. Technically, she was an NPC, or Non Player Character, which meant she didn’t have free will. This made her another computer program my brain was supposed to experience when it was jacked into the network of the Virtual Reality game. However, we’d married in the game and she expected it to be permanent.

  I couldn’t be killed. Even if the wolf pack under her command ripped me apart, I would leave the game and return to the real world. I still wasn’t clear if it would hurt when the wolves went at me, but I didn’t care to find out.

  We were in a clearing on the mountain, the first in a series of two game scenarios I’d encountered. Chamita had her back to me. She continued to cry. I still wasn’t sure how I got back in the game; all I remembered was the forest and her in it. She was excited to see me when I found her, but her face changed and she turned away. I knew why. I’d left the game and never told her the reason. For a computer program in a VR game world, she still had a lot of passion.

  Right now, she directed a lot of anger at me. I’d run up to her, but she wouldn’t talk. So here I was, Chamita’s little shoulders in front of me. I had to keep my sanity and not remember what we were doing the last time I saw those shoulders.

  “Vince!” she screamed my name as she refused to look at me. “You stay away!”

  At which point the wolves emerged from the forest.

  I wasn’t concerned for her. She was raised with them in this game scenario. Those wolves glared in my direction. One word from her and they’d be on me in seconds. I had no desire to find out what meat in a sausage grinder experienced.

  “Chamita,” I said to her. “I’m back and I’m sorry.” I kissed her on the neck and she continued to cry. “I love you, Chamita, I would never leave you.”

  She stopped crying. The landscape changed. Chamita turned around to face me.

  But it wasn’t Chamita. Chamistra, the abbess of the Shakti Convent in Wolves of the Lost City faced me. She was Chamita’s Indian subcontinent double and resembled my little wolf girl in every way that mattered. Except Chamistra was the leader of a group of women ascetics who lived on top of a cliff side in the jungle next to an abandoned ancient city.

  “Glad to see you back, captain,” she said to me. I looked around and saw the clearing turn to the clean white stone of the lost city.

  When I last saw Chamistra, we were in the jungles next to the place where we’d buried the courier box. I was supposed to locate it to win the game. With Chamistra’s help, I’d accomplished this and buried the box. It contained plenty of information that could bring down Ruby Realizations, the company that hired me to test their VR game world. Now Ruby Realizations was merged with Sandstone Gems, the company that sent me into Wolf Mountain, to form “Pursuant Entertainment”. The new company begged me to come and work for them. The Chamistra program was rogue and blocked all attempts to get inside the combined VR game world unless it could talk to me.

  Except I wasn’t at Pursuant’s headquarters, I was in a car on my way to them. At least that was where I was supposed to be at the present.

  “You’ve pissed off a lot of people, Mother Chamistra,” I said to her. She stood in front of me in her plain wrap. She had both hands on her hips and a string of beads around her neck. Chamistra was covered in grey cremation fire ash. She had the sandalwood paste mark of the sect on her forehead. Chamistra and Chamita were still close enough in physical appearance to be twin sisters.

  “Do tell, captain,” she told me and took a step forward. Her bare feet made the slightest sound on the stone floor of the city while the sheer fabric of her wrap rustled on it.

  Captain? I looked down. The British Army officer body they’d given me for Lost City was gone. It wasn’t even the Jeff Chandler hunk body I’d had on the mountain. This time I was back to the chunky twenty something body I had at the beginning of the first game. The time I’d spent in VR land had melted a lot of the fat away, but I still had plenty to loose.

  “So what are you going to do about it?” she asked me. With one hand, she pulled the wrap off her body and tossed it to the floor.

  Before I could respond, she was on me. Her legs were wrapped around my thighs and her arms across my neck. I couldn’t have pulled her off if I wanted to do so.

  “You married me in the first world,” Chamistra whispered in my ear. “I think it still counts. Chamita want her Daddy Wolf!”

  I bumped my head on the padded door rest as I sat up. The car was already parked in the lot for the new company. I still had the same driver who picked me up at the apartment. And I was back in the real world.

  No phase-shift this time, or any of the headaches that accompanied my spontaneous travel into the VR game world. I’d experienced a dream, although it was a very intense one. By now, I could tell the difference, although no one believed me when I told them I’d spontaneously shifted from the real world to the virtual one. You still needed an entire cybernetics team to do that in their mind.

  The building which housed the headquarters of Pursuant Entertainment, or PE as I’d begun to think of them, was the same one used by Ruby Realizations. The paint was fresh on the door sign as I walked up to it. I’d noted several teams who were in the process of changing the signage outside. I wasn’t too surprised about this as the news articles I’d read online suggested the merger would leave intact the overall structure of both companies. I was certain the big changes would come later. It would happen when the new board of directors decided they didn’t need two groups of people who did the same job.

  I’d been through this before at several places I worked since college and the end game was never good. In essence, each employee was hauled in front of a group on inquisitors who screamed, “Justify yourself!” Those who could were allowed to keep their position for the time being.

  This time I was greeted by Rhonda, the face of mission control when I was inside the VR world. I’d expected to meet some of the same old managers I’d worked with in the previous companies, but not her right away.

  “Surprised to see me?” Rhonda asked. Her new position seemed to fit her. The dress she wore had to be from a private designer and the shoes were imported Italian leather. What ever happened, the result was good for Rhonda.

  “I expected Heath or Jack,” I told her as we walked down the hall. I didn’t have anything with me as the driver took my luggage to the same room I’d used when I came here to work for the previous company. “Are they still in the picture?”

  “Of course,” she replied. “Those two are way above the firing line. Sign these.” She handed me another stack of documents that involved liability, the money I was to be paid, and several other legal matters.

  The money in the n
ew contract staggered my eyes. They were ready to hand me enough cash to pay my bills and live a happy life for the next ten years and a portion was already in my bank account. Whatever they wanted me to do had to be critical if this much cash was dangled in front of my face. The other paperwork was the standard forms I’d signed for the previous companies. Of course, the big bucks were contingent on my completion of the job to their satisfaction. I didn’t worry about any holdbacks. I’d have a good knowledge of their VR network if this thing were resolved. They wouldn’t risk anything going bad, too much at stake. I signed the papers with speed as I walked down the hall on the back of a clipboard and returned them to Rhonda. She handed me back my copies, which I folded and put in my pants’ pocket.

  “Aren’t you tired of signing these things?” she asked me. “I’d think by now you’d have a special pen to do it.”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t make much difference. If the company gets angry at me, they’ll find some way to screw me over. That much never changes.”

  “Always the optimist,” Rhonda told me and opened the door to the same conference room I’d used before.

  It was a little strange to see Heath Mint and Jack seated at the same side of the conference table. Around them were arranged the various vice presidents and technical officers of PE, many who were holdovers from Ruby Realizations. I was told most of their names the last time I met them, but I’d forgot the information. I was reintroduced. Then I promptly forgot their names again.

  “Glad to see you back,” Heath told me as he shook my hand. I sat down near Jack, who looked on in silence.

  Jack was a big man at the former Sandstone Gems Company. Something told me he was on his way out, but was forced to attend this meeting.

  “So why was it so important to get me back?” I asked the people at the table. “I don’t think it went too well the last time. Can someone fill me in on this urgent situation?” Before I could say anything else, all eyes turned to Heath. Apparently, He was given the job as spokesman.

  “You remember the Chamistra character you encountered inside the VR world of Wolves of the Lost City?” Heath asked me as he adjusted his silk tie. Somethings never changed.

  “How could I forget?” I asked him. I didn’t want to go into the particulars, as they were too embarrassing. “She did look a lot like the wolf girl in the Wolf Mountain game that Jack put me through.” I glared at Jack and he tried to avoid my eyes.

  “Yeah, we were both using the same open software design,” Heath avoided the accusation. He was good at that.

  “The point is,” he continued, “the program has gone rogue, like I tried to talk to you about earlier.” I was a little surprised he’d admit to sharing confidential information over the phone, but no one registered an emotion.

  “You told me some general things, could you get specific?” I demanded.

  “Three days ago the rogue program locked down the entire VR network,” he informed me and let the knowledge sink into my mind. I could feel the temperature in the room drop 5 degrees.

  “We had some trouble getting you out of the last game,” he told me. “The program resisted our attempts to unlock your neuro-system from the VR game network, which is why you ended up in a hospital. After we got you out of there, the entire system was overhauled and we went in, located the program, and isolated it. Or so we thought. After we built the new game framework, it showed back up. We thought it might be a residual of the previous character program, but no, it was the same one. Somehow, and we still don’t know how it happened, the program reconstituted itself and merged with a similar one inside the Wolf Mountain game. We suspect it linked up when the two VR networks were joined after the corporations merged.”

  “But you’re not sure,” I interjected from my side of the table.

  “We sure something is inside the network that has self-awareness,” Heath snapped back. “Whatever it is, the character, which is supposed to be an NPC, is making up its own script. So, no we’re not sure it’s a program that has self-awareness; it could be something else.”

  “But I want you to consider the possibilities of what it would mean if we have a self-aware program inside the system,” Heath continued as he lowered his eyes at me. “I don’t even want to speculate what could happen if that thing got loose in the Internet. Right now, we’ve ripped out every connection from the VR network that links to the Internet. The entire building has been detached from any outside network. I had an HVAC crew in here today to make sure not one single appliance is hooked to the Net.”

  “Do you have a game plan?” I asked him. This whole situation bothered me, as I didn’t fancy the role of sacrificial lamb.

  “We had a new game scenario written and programmed inside the VR game network before this all happened. The rogue wants to talk to you, and you only. We’ve figured out a way to get you into the simulated game world. You’ll still have your logbook and plot caches, but the point of this game will be to locate that rogue and neutralize it. You’ll be given a revolver that is tied into an antivirus program, the best one we can afford. You’ll get close enough to the “Wolf Queen” as she’s calling herself in this game, and shoot her. Shooting her launches the antivirus program into the rogue system. Once the antiviral ware goes to work, she’ll be isolated for real this time for real and erased. There will be no further trouble.”

  “Are you serious?” I responded to him. “Is she supposed to be some kind of evil overlord?” I didn’t like where this was going at all.

  “No, in the original game design she guarded the lost treasure of King Solomon’s mine on an island in the Pacific. The year is 1933 and you’ll be dropped into the game world with a logbook again. You’ll have the revolver I mentioned, and whatever else you find in those plot caches.”

  “Some of those plot caches were designed to through me off the game. Did you change all of them?”

  “Nope. The game was too far along when this happened. We can’t get inside it anyway to make those changes. You’ll need to follow the game as it was originally designed. The only exception is that you’ll shoot the guardian of the treasure instead of taking possession of it.”

  “I am really not comfortable with any scenario that calls for me to shoot her.”

  “Look, what is the big deal here?” Heath snapped at me, his chart collar pin a bright gold in the light of the florescent bulbs. “It’s not as if she’s real, for Christ’s sake. All you are going to do is go inside a virtual world and disable a program that is messing shit up for us! Do you want the money or not? We can get any one of a dozen experts to do this job, but you’ve had some experience in these games. We’d like to prevent the entire VR system from being ripped apart. If you can’t get in there and shut the program down, we’ll be forced to fry every single electronic device in the network and that would be very expensive. Good bye, Wolf Mountain and Wolves of the Lost City.”

  That did it. He knew I couldn’t abandon my “wife”, the poor little wolf girl, even if she was simply a program. Or not. I had some suspicions there, but, if they destroyed it all, I would never know for sure if Chamita was based on a real person. Right now, I didn’t trust anyone.

  “I’ll do it,” I told him. “When do we start?”

  “I’m not sure it is a rogue program,” Jack confided in me at dinner in the cafeteria that evening. They still had the same corporate restaurant that Ruby Realizations used before the merger. I noticed the logos for Ruby were covered by the ones for PE.

  We sat at a table across from each other. Heath wanted to be by later, but couldn’t be sure when, so Jack, my old manager from two companies ago, was stuck with the job. He didn’t seem to be very motivated. It wasn’t hard to see why. Heath was the favored son in the new corporate order and Jack’s position was on the chopper. I was sure he already sent his resume out to some discreet contacts in the gamer world.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked him as I took a sip of coffee. At least my headaches hadn’t returned.

&
nbsp; “The way it reappeared when we were certain the original program was isolated,” he explained. “Too many questions unanswered. But they are sure it is and that’s why you will be sent in to take it down.”

  “I thought there was only one link into the network? If it locked up the whole system, how could anyone else have access to it?”

  “I don’t know,” he looked at the tablecloth. “I told them to run multiple tests to see if there was some back door port no one knew about, but the way it took over the network scared them shitless. I suppose getting you inside is the best way.”

  Now I was concerned. All good and fine for them to get me inside that VR world and they wouldn’t even have to worry about paying me any more money should something go wrong. Right now all PE cared about was staying alive. Should that rogue program keep them locked out of the VR network, they’d have to destroy their VR world in order to save it. And what then? They had all the research to start over. But could they even trust their back-ups? If they’d made copies of the VR world, how could they be sure the rogue wasn’t infected inside them too?

  2.

  ‘It was Hans,” Jack blurted out. “Hans was the real genius behind it all and he went nuts.” He put the fork down and pushed his plate away.

  “Hans?” I asked him. I knew whom he talked about, but I wanted to see what I could learn from Jack.

  “Hans Konkin,” he said. “The man who figured out how to make it all work. The treated him like shit in the end once everyone thought we had the basic system in operation. Everyone built on what he did and look how he ended up. Crazy as a bedbug and in a rest home.”

  I’d gone to see Hans after my misadventure inside the Wolf Mountain game. He was in a rest home and barely knew where he was when I met him. After I began to shift back and forth from the game world, I found out about Hans. It didn’t take me long to find out where he was located. I lied my way into his rest home. He was the one who told me there was a Chamita prototype that existed in the real world. I still didn’t know whether to believe what he told me. Even after I saw Chamita’s real world version in my apartment.