Lidier's Game [Part Three]

Lopping off a few arms and legs of some giant cock roaches was a piece of cake, but suffocating a wandering bandit enhanced by months of grinding was an entirely different thing. You never really knew whether that person was going to be another gamer, or if they were going to be a regular old NPC.

The game had this method of keeping count of every civilian you murdered in cold blood, it didn't matter if they were the local nun, or a highwayman on the run; hitching a ride on the back of a bullet train, sky diving from the back of flying wing, all a matter of course. But like landing in the Indian Ocean or wandering the Sahara desert, it was the stop that got you. And sometimes the storm doesn't blow over. Lidier got used to not having many friends, though it even surprised her when some of her loyal business partners, when trying to loot during levels of armor for different on line gamers, how many of them would go onto throw her under the bus.

The alliance of European nations was not quite to the level of the United States, when it came to turning immigrants into Ice. But suffice to say, they have their way. Their way of putting all you've ever known on ice. The last troop she belonged to, wanted to explore an ancient ruins in the game: as far as in game continuity was concerned, it was a product of a lost civilization shot down by aliens. But with any kind of game play session, most of the time the story and plot was largely secondary.

The story of life was having her mother repair her stop watches, and being led into raising a cat who feared yetis, and never quite understanding why. Only that whenever she read books about cryptozoology, the cat was alway encourage her to turn the page whenever a yeti was on the sheet. But now with her mother now living in British Columbia, and her father nowhere to be found in Honduras, possibly aiding the plight of refugees, she enjoyed a certain relaxed contempt for humanity uncensored by the expectation of familial lineage, not the flow of the Mariachi or the Flamenco.

The only time she tolerated the Mariachi, was when her peers would have mock up digitized weddings using their SL avatars, among other products and services on the older second version of the net, when services were still largely centralized, including on line video streaming services milking you for every dollar you were worth just to catch up on Japanese fighting anime, among other preteen forms of entertainments.

Even on Pleroma, interaction was few and far between. Real human interaction that is, and the web still had a method of isolating you from the real world, that left her constantly feeling fatigued.

Lidier had a natural inclination toward hating fantasy, whether that was stories of Jesus, Catherine Howard, or some blend of the two. Even stories where Catherine was Jesus, and other vague tales of decapitation martyrdom. The flow of an ax blade chopping through a slender neck, the dying sensation of draining blood. She hated girls who were white saviors, almost to a fault. Taste the wounds of desire, cover them in salt. Flow to the lyrical melody of long strawberry locks, and tutor bonnet filles in their Birkenstock clogs. The flow of time moving past the the of the ax.

She finished testing a new game called Nihilist. It was similar to Rogue, Moria, Angband, and others of their ilk. The main difference was that you had to type out directions, and then press enter. There were two primary rooms, a circular room and a square room. There was a home state that was always the same. You solved ciphers instead of fighting monsters, although the point of which you'd solve any specific key state largely depended on the luck of the gamer. Lidier was the kind of girl to have the worst luck in the social world, yet seemed to never run out of it on the net. She wanted to play a game where she could actually see Catherine Howard's head fall off her body. Caressing Cat's head, she would snuggle with it as if it were her new pet cat.

On most days, she never seemed to have time playing rogue likes. She had gotten out of the habit ever since she had returned from Washington State, roughly five years ago since twenty sixteen. And now she longed for the time she could play one of the game states, with no weed eaters blowing outside. Only the noise of prostitutes in the red light district, and the smoke of cigarettes in the air just down the road from Strasbourg proper. She imagined cute girls with giant bows, sticking their necks in the chopper. Their long strawberry blond locks staring into a forever blue sky. She carried a thing of pepper spray, but wanted to purchase a taser for more troublesome men who harassed her. Her trust issues had been largely destroyed five years ago. And it was a struggle to feel like a queen again. But she wasn't the queen of Henry the 8th, or any other male monarch.

Her solace was the flow of Hacklikes, Roguelikes, and Nihilistlikes. All varieties raining down from the sky like live wire pop music. While she dreamed up beheaded French and British girls during the middle ages upwards into the French Revolution. The flow of blood dripping down the neck.

When Lidier logged into the game, she primarily focused on hanging around narrow passage ways. The reasoning was simple: you could fend off an entire army as a single person, fighting one of them at a time. But in this game called Nihilist, the focus was on solving a specialized kind of cipher: there were over two thousand possible cipher states, each one only being reciprocal to that specific key. The catch was, you as the player didn't know the key. She had, based on one success, determined that each locked had the same answer. Thus each time she put in the same answer, regardless of what the randomly jumbled letters amounted to. It worked every time.

She wondered was it was the game designer didn't try for something different, mainly finding a ciphered door that had a different pass phrase every time she encountered a new one. But this would mean having as many pass phrases as there way possible keys that could encipher them. A seemingly insurmountable programming task, that allowed for an infinite number of possible cipher texts. It was easy to guess the answer if the answer remained constantly the same, and it provided almost no challenge whatsoever, therefore the perfect balances was different lengths and amounts of pass phrases for every locked door. Then made the programming job go from being over two thousand possible pass phrases, to only a dozen or so pass phrases, gradually increasing in difficult. In a sense, the game she imagined would be a kind of code breaker's simulator.

But the current game she played, was not a simulator. It was, was repetitive lines of code.

Infinite procedurally generated dungeons that followed the same basic shape, only varying based on the shape. With her stiletto blade, and her Birkenstock clogs, she hobbled around the corridors looking for food. Longing for the day that she could escape this seemingly infinite dungeon.

She unplugged herself from the machine.

She went to get her teethed cleaned with her own toothbrush, as suppose to the one owned by the sharp dentist, with an equally sharp wit. Who, went she would visit him in her early twenties, made her want to do the splits. But now, for him and nobody else, she felt more than at any other point, that she could give two shits. He had punctured the wrong gums, scratched the wrong tooth. And now, after the surgery, she had to pay for out of her own pocket, she largely avoided tooth doctors.

She got out herself a joint.

And became a fire breathing dragon, in lines of endless binary. Jacked in on a constant endless hallucination, she longed for day when she would not wake up from her sleep. She remembered when she used to read Cyberpunk novels, but largely lost her interest. She now preferred literary fiction, but seldom had time to read. The apartment she lived in provided almost not opportunity for lack of distraction, she had even when in early grade school where she had to do fractions.

Noise was her constant detraction.

Her constant bane.