George didn't look so good. Twenty successfully executed command sequences translated to twenty dog treats. Twenty dog treats on top of what had been a very generous breakfast. And George hadn't hesitated to stuff down every last one. Needless to say, George was feeling the consequences of his life choices.
"Sorry about that George, we probably should have trained before breakfast rather than after, eh? Can't help it now can we." Bob slapped George on his side and the dog gave his master an annoyed and somewhat dizzy look.
"Whoops my bad. So, George you still want to climb that hill?"
Bob could be a little mean at times. George looked longingly up at the hill. He whined a little (why couldn't we go before), but wobbled forward all the same. That dog really was something. Bob looked on with not a little awe.
Together they trekked their way up the rising slope. George made it twenty or so steps before the inevitable happened. The dog vomited up all twenty treats and a portion of his breakfast.
Dogs really have no self-control do they? You'd think animals would know to stop eating after they were full. Some evolutionary hoarding instinct maybe. Bob knelt beside the dog, cleaning his beard fur with one of the bathroom's nice cotton towels. As soon as he was clean, George naturally gandered a lick at the pool of warm sick. Waste not want not. Bob had to drag the dog away from his literal seconds.
It turned out that throwing up was exactly what the dog had needed. His stomach lightened, George bounced back in spirit and energy. "Don't run off too far." Maybe the dog heard, maybe he didn’t. George did run off all the same, zigzagging around the tall grasses and having himself a ball of time. Bob shook his head, trying to frown at the dog’s utter lack of caution, but finding he couldn’t quite hold back a smile at the dog’s antics. George really did know how to lighten the mood.
Strictly speaking, to the top of that hill hardly constituted a walk at all. The bathroom had been dropped into a small leveling as the hill stepped forward before sloping down. From door to summit couldn’t have been more than a couple hundred meters along a gentle, controlled slope. The whole thing wouldn’t even take them ten minutes.
During the walk, Bob found the time to worry himself about their living situation. The system shop was a real lifeline, no mistake, but somehow he felt more like he'd swallowed a fishhook than been pulled kindly up onto dry land. Those shipping rates were criminal. 10,000 credits per kilogram! Bob grimaced to himself as he walked behind the dog, keeping an eye on the playful tail bouncing up and down.
The more Bob saw the system in action, the more he thought it was all some elaborate money-grab. The system swoops in with its initiation, slaughtering four-fifth of the population, then plays twister with our planet, destroying all civilization and decimating any means we might have had to support ourselves and, the coup de grace, it sets up a system-run monopoly with exorbitant prices. All that was left was to watch us struggle and suffer as we all mercilessly choke to death. Had the system turned earth into a slave colony?
Still despite his grumblings, Bob had to acknowledge he was better off than most. His stellar initiation performance had netted him some four million credits profit. He would be able to afford food for himself and George for the foreseeable future.
Alas man can’t live on bread alone. Water. Man is made of water. Water, the liquid of life, the unfortunately extremely heavy liquid of life. An average human used about 50-100 liters of water a day. Of course, most of that was consumed by the unnecessary luxuries of showering, washing clothes and cooking. But still between the two of them, they’d want at least five liters a day, wouldn’t they? Especially if they ended up having to fight and walk and run. Five liters would set Bob back 50,000 credits a day. A pretty penny to secure a basic human right. Even Bob’s fortune would be bled dry in a month or two.
And Bob was the lucky one. What had Rad said? Their whole company had had less than 2600 credits all told. They'd have had to pool their funds just to buy that plastic bowl and the dog's breakfast. Store-bought food and water were impossibly expensive. No wonder people felt little choice but to turn to banditry.
If you valued your conscience and declined to turn bandit, you'd have to forage and hunt. Something must live in these grasslands. Or maybe not, Bob reconsidered, they hadn't seen a single animal all day. Animals, at least the semi-sentients, seemed to had participated in the initiation along with humans. That meant they had been slaughtered wholesale. An 82% reduction in their numbers, combined with the fact that any survivors now had magical powers, did not make hunting an attractive proposition. High risk, low reward. Hell we might be seeing an age where the animals start hunting humans again. If George had a mind to, he could certainly drop Bob whenever he felt like it.
The thought of magically-enhanced predators stalking them in the tall grasses spoiled the walk's tranquility for Bob. He felt a sudden need to keep George occupied and out of trouble. The dog had already gotten them into one pickle today and Bob wanted to avoid a second. Well George was a golden retriever wasn’t he? One easy way to keep that breed distracted. Bob scrambled around for a dead branch. “Here George, get the stick.” Bob hurled the stick in their direction of travel, walking briskly up behind. George bounded off, always pleased to rush after thrown things.
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However, perhaps still dazed by his gluttony and subsequent regurgitation, the dog seemed to have some trouble finding the branch. He nosed around, looked up confusedly, barked, circled. Finally he rushed back to Bob with a stick in his mouth.
“Drop.” George dropped the stick and Bob picked it up, still making a beeline to the hill’s crown.
“What? This isn’t the stick I threw, George. No, wait a moment,” Bob thought he recognized the object, “isn’t this the stick you brought last time.” Bob eyed the dog suspiciously. “Where’d you find this George?” The dog barked happily, the picture of innocent.
Bob was not to be dissuaded though. It was definitely the same stick. The nice one, well-balanced and well-proportioned. The dog must have been carrying the stick around with him somehow. And there was only one place to look. Bob reached over and flipped open the leather satchel on George’s back, sure he’d find a series of nicknacks and worthless objects, but, hm... the bag was quite empty.
“When’s you learn to do magic George?” The dog, a little hot from running back and forth, panted alongside Bob with his tongue lolling out.
“The consummate professional I see. Never let the audience in of the trick.” Bob hurled the stick again, this time almost cresting the hilltop. George ran after and Bob trained hawk-like eyes on the creature.
This time, however, George zoomed straight for where the stick had landed, neatly picked it up in his mouth and cantered back to Bob’s location. “You’ve outsmarted me George.” Bob was shaking his head. “I don’t know how you did it.” He ruffled the dog’s head as they both summited the hill, George barking contentedly. Was George secretly a genius?
Hello there. Standing on the crest of the hill stood a metal tripod: a black, three legged, futuristic device planted into the ground. “No George,” Bob had to grab the dog by the scruff of his neck to prevent him from immediately lunging at the thing.
Bob approached slowly. He circled the object and then he circled it again. It looked harmless enough. At any rate it hadn’t transformed into some kind of sentry gun and chopped them both down. So Bob mustered up his courage. He tiptoed just close enough to reach out a hand and... touched the object.
> Unlock system pylon?
>
> Yes or No
>
>
> Price: 100,000 credits
The message had startled Bob and he’d been sprinting for the cover before he finally processed the grey, translucent text on his display. System pylon, he chewed on the unfamiliar word, what did pylon mean again? Was there a system dictionary? Alas the system seemed to assume basic linguistic competency from its charges. Most unreasonable. Bob associated the word with those skeletal towers that carried electricity over mountaintops, but it was a low confidence association.
Bob walked back over to the object and came down into a crossed-legged seating position. He let George wander free and the dog approached the tripod, gave it a few level sniffs and one long lick, before deciding it was a poor companion and bumbling off to pursue mischief elsewhere. Bob was debating the merits of unlocking the so-called system pylon. He had no idea what the thing would do. So the question had an abstract, amorphous quality like a badly framed moral dilemma.
First from the financial perspective, 100,000 credits was nothing to Bob. He’d been thinking of spending that much on drinking water for himself and George over a weekend. He knew now, however, that 100,000 credits was rather a lot for the average survivor. The exit fee had been a mere 1000 credits and most (sane) people would likely exit the casino as soon as they could afford the fee. That would leave them with 0 credits or whatever chips were left over, so maybe 200-300 credits at the most. Combine that with the marked absence of any obvious credit earning mechanism and it was hard to see how most survivors could dream of affording such a proposition.
Second from the moral perspective, would the system be so twistedly evil as to actually set up a pay-to-trigger trap? It would constitute the utter height of cruelty. You’re greeted with an innocuous system message offering you the option to unlock a system pylon. You press yes and the whole hillside explodes, or it triggers some tower defense invasion and the hill starts getting assaulted by waves of angry monsters. And it only costs you 100,000 credits for the privilege.
Bob frowned. He thought the prospect unlikely. Unlikely but not impossible. He could see the system justifying itself by saying something along the lines of: why did he trust a random notification? Doesn’t he know there are bad people in this world? Hasn’t he ever been scammed before? He should thank us, we just taught him the value of some healthy skepticism.
Aha, Bob might have found a loophole. The message had not disappeared when he’d made his quick dash for shelter. In other words, he could accept the request without standing next to the pylon. Very well. “Come on, George.”
Together they descended a good hundred paces. “Ok George, you ready? Brace yourself ok. 2 to 1 we are going to have sprint for the bathroom base. You got that?” George was a dog and human language was not his speciality, but he did bark and seemed ready to run after whatever Bob was planning to throw. Bob pressed yes.
The hill rumbled and Bob was almost knocked off his feet. He looked up to see the tripod pillaring upwards as a large, black tower started to emerge from the hillside. Good God, what I have gotten myself into. Bob laid a hand on George (just in case) as he watched the tower shimmer to life, blue holographic panels flashing on between the framework.
It did look a little like one of those electric pylons, didn’t it? Must be where the name came from. The rumbling stilled, the pylon appearing to have completed its transformation. Bob waited. One, two, three. Nothing happened. He sighed. They were all good. It is was over. He was safe— Ping!
A system notification. Ok, not unexpected. Ping, ping! Two more. Three in total, fair, fair, all within predictions. Ping, ping, ping! Six notifications. Six bloody notifications. Bob went white. Had he just done something he shouldn’t have? Was it a coincidence that a system pylon had been placed almost directly beside his starting position? Beside his starting position, Robert Brown, probably the only survivor with enough credits to afford unlocking it.
Yeah that was likely. There were probably system pylons all over the place. It was a pylon pandemic. People were already complaining that they were spoiling the view. Or not and Bob had ended up doing exactly what the system wanted him to.
Only one way to find out.