I am the rainbow

The sudden darkness gave way to blinding white light, and a pure humming tone that had the feeling of crystal. Slowly, both faded and Gradie found himself in a hexagonal room with colored mirror walls and a circular table at the center.

“Oh man, this map!” Nova said, enthusiastically. “I haven’t seen this place in years!”

“Probably because we haven’t taken anyone brand new since Marcus,” Angel said, in the tone of someone talking in a church.

“Welcome to Colors,” a voice said from everywhere, reverbing off the glass like a tuning fork. It was a different voice then the one at the entrance to Gunmaze, and Gradie assumed it was one of the makers of this place.

“Use the mirrors to choose a color. Select a weapon at the center table. You may change both color and weapon during the game. Death results in a duel. Victors may select respawn location based on color or prism, if one has been attuned. Have fun.”

Half a second later, the same voice started up again, as if from a different audio file.

“The game type is deathmatch. The goal is to score the highest Kill to player ratio. Good luck.”

“Kill to player?” Gradie asked.

“Yeah, so like the average kd ratio of any given party. It’s to balance teams of different sizes,” Nova said, already at the table. Like Gradie, he and the other two were solid white, as if some big model maker in the sky had forgotten to paint any of them.

“So if a team of five gets five kills, that’s one K to P, so a solo player would only have to get one kill to be even with them. Which weapon do you want? We’ll let you have first pick.”

Nova motioned to the hexagonal table, where Gradie found four weapons.

“Assault rifle, sniper, grenade launcher, shotgun.”

Gradie picked up the assault rifle, a solid white hunk of what felt like an impossible blend of plastic and metal formed into something halfway between an AR and AK platform, with a top-mounted carrying handle and drastic banana clip.

Angel grabbed the shotgun and tossed Nova the sniper while Luke shouldered the grenade launcher. From the silent and immediate way they distributed the weapons, Gradie detected a synergy he was still uncomfortably outside of.

Nova waved at the mirror walls.

“All right bro, now pick a color. Just shoot one.”

The mirrors were red, green, blue, yellow, orange, and purple. Gradie aimed down the iron sights, a three quarters ring with a post in the center, and shot the red mirror. The gun kicked lightly and flashed with a big four-pointed star of muzzle burst. The sound was muffled and he didn’t even feel it in his teeth. Compared to the memory sims of the Vault, it was a plastic sensation. Compared to the gunfire in the Hardworlds, he almost laughed out loud.

The red mirror vibrated from the bullet impact and when it stopped shaking, the Gradie reflected in it was a much darker red. He looked down at his forearm and found it a deep scarlet. There were more plastic sounds around him as the twins shot other mirrors and Luke punched his.

“Real quick, let me give you a crash course,” Nova said, now a solid orange. “Your color effects a lot of things. Like you do more damage to materials and players of your opposite color, which for red is blue, but also you take more damage from yellow. I’m orange, so I’m weak to purple but strong against green. It’s like two rock paper scissor games, got it?”

“And keep in mind you can change colors while you’re out there if we need a tactical advantage.” Angel had picked green.

“And if you get all the colors in one game, something magical happens,” Luke said with mock drama, his smiling face a monochrome blue.

“Don’t spoil it, bro!” Nova said, like witnessing a sacrilege. Given the fact that he and the rest of them looked like freshly minted toys in a crayon box, Gradie found his distress hilarious.

“Match starts in thirty seconds,” the voice said.

“All right, form up,” Luke said, sounding suddenly serious. The twins deferred to his commands, which Gradie found surprising given the obvious gap in experience with Gunmaze, and the formation ended up with Luke in the front, the twins staggered at his flanks, and Gradie in between them, but also staggered so he wouldn’t flag them.

Suddenly, all the concrete commands Philip had shouted in the clubhouse echoed through the child’s toy box surroundings, clashing strangely. Gradie went from feeling like the brother tagging along to the professional QB asked to play a scrimmage at the local Y.

“Ten,”

Standing amidst his friends, holding a weapon, about to be dropped into an unfamiliar game where, as far as he knew, anything was possible, connected to an unknown but surely massive number of other players, and finally, at last, confident in his ability to do something other than embarrass himself, Gradie felt that humming, electric, adrenaline-tasting feeling of excitement flow through him.

Here was something he had dreamed about since he was a child. Here, maybe, at last, was the Otherworld equivalent of what the Hardworlds offered. A freedom to explore. A freedom to test himself.

“One, Fight!”

There was a flash of bright light, and Gradie knew they had all been turned into a rainbow and beamed down to the map below. Suddenly, they were in a sunken room with multicolored walls, standing on a large flat platform of solid green material that felt like something between plastic and felt beneath his feet. The sky above was a simple light blue gradient, and shapes of rainbow floated under it, like chunks of legos stuck together.

Angel pointed up at the sky. His voice came over the comms.

“Our best move would be to get up to one of those orbitals and attune to its crystal. We need to find a reflector.”

“Right here.” Nova pointed, and Gradie noticed a faint rainbow beam coming from somewhere on the other side of the far wall up towards a top-shaped chunk of rainbow blocks hanging in the sky.

Angel nodded.

“Right. Let’s go for it. Gradie, remember, attack blue, avoid yellow.”

They moved in formation through the tall rectangle cut into the far wall and found themselves in a downward sloping wide hallway that ended in a slice of quasi sunlight illuminating what at this distance Gradie could only guess was some kind of multicolored crater. As they moved forward, Gradie noticed openings to other tunnels and passageways in the sides of the hall, and even pits and shafts. There was very little gradience to anything, every shadow was a solid quadrilateral or rhombus, every surface was one tone. It made the recesses of his weapons and his allies stand out starkly, and he guessed that was the point.

For the first time, he noticed the weight of his Avatar, like a thin layer of wet cloth spread tightly over him, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his motions were somewhat delayed, though when he swiped the rifle in front of his face, it seemed to move in real time. With every step, the sensation lessened, and he wasn’t sure if that was due to him getting used to the feeling, or the Avatar “learning” how he moved. He hope it was the former. The last thing he wanted was any part of this place learning how he did anything.

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Just before they got to the end of the passage, a solid yellow laser beam bisected the opening from the top right to the bottom left, then vanished as the gunshot echoed down the hall.

“Shit! Hug the walls,” Luke hissed on the communicator and fanned one hand backward.

They lined up on the right wall with Gradie at the rear and stalked towards the opening. Something exploded and more laser gunfire with a faster cadence echoed from the shaft just outside the opening, which grade could now see was ringed by balconies and platforms and riddled with shadowed openings. Just outside their own hallway, the balcony slanted up to the left and down to the right.

“All right bros, eyes open. I’m gonna try and get a shot.” Nova moved up with his sniper shouldered.

“Watch the rear.” Luke reminded them, while stepping across the hallway to the other wall, where he took aim at the left side of the balcony. Angel aimed at the right side and Gradie aimed back down where they had come from.

Just dim hallway and the shadows of the various offshoots. Laser sounds and dull explosions and other sounds he didn’t recognize echoed out of some of them. He could hear Nova stepping up to the gap slowly, his footsteps sounding like stock noise that Gradie knew was amplified by the game.

“Shit!” Nova hissed in shock, his voice breaking out into the air and echoing with the communicator. Gradie turned back to the front and saw movement out in the shaft and brought his gun around in an instinct. By the time he realized what it was, Nova and Luke were already laughing.

“It’s just a block. Relax.” Angel’s voice was solely on the comms, but his laugh echoed in the hall. The solid yellow block floated lazily up the shaft and disappeared past the top of the opening.

Gradie aimed back down the hall, and felt something strange.

Nostalgia. Déjà vu. He guessed it was because this all felt like the archetype of an online shooter, and that the map had some resemblance to one he had played long ago when games came on cartridges and dial up still lingered, but the explanation was lacking. There was something else about it. Like he had dreamed it and forgot.

“All right, we’re clear,” Nova said.

“Ok. Next block that comes up, we should be on it,” Angel said.

“Contact right.” Luke’s voice, even echoing dreamily in the comms, was like a live current jumping from Gradie’s ear to his nervous system. His training moved him before his mind could catch up, and he swiveled back to the front in time to see Luke fire a grenade with a cobalt hued flash and puff of smoke. Half a second later, the explosion echoed out in the shaft.

“Got that mother fucker. Oh shit, hello!”

Luke pivoted in a way that reminded Gradie of his gunfights in the Hardworlds, but the movement was more twitchy here, as if gravity and Luke’s muscle speed were farther out of whack from their Real counterparts.

Another burst of blue smoke.

“Contact! Two floors down!”

A rainbow of projectiles soared through the opening, and only about half of them came from below. Luke stepped backward firing and glided over the ground.

“And every fucking where else too!”

He side-stepped and got ready to charge the opening again, but Nova stopped him.

“One sec, making some cover.” He shot the ground with his sniper and the yellow beam took a man-sized chunk out of the green material in a burst like a monochromed glitter bomb.

“Hell yeah. Hey, shoot right here!” Luke pointed to the ceiling ten yards from the opening.

“Get me like an angle.” He made a motion with his hand and Nova nodded with a smile.

“I got you bro, I got it.” He shot five times in a slow semi auto cadence until a jagged tunnel broke out into the shaft at an angle.

“Fuck yeah!” Luke aimed up into the new hole and stepped back and forth until he had a bead on something and fired.

“Shit. They scattered. Can you make me one in the floor too?”

“They’re thinning out,” Angel said, peeking around the corner. Out in the shaft, the rainbow storm of beams and bombs that had been crosshatching the open space had died down.

Angel looked up in the air then down as far as he could without sticking his head out.

“Another block should be coming up. We should go for it.”

Luke abandoned the fresh channel Nova had carved in the floor and crept towards the edge of the hallway.

“Shit, all right yall, serpentine. Don’t make it easy on em. Gradie, Get up here.”

“Hit it with your bomb when it’s about two levels down,” Angel said. “That will be our signal.”

“Ok bros here it comes,” Nova said, looking through the hole in the ground.

Angel and Luke were hugging both walls, peeking into the shaft. Nova slinked up behind his brother with his sniper raised.

“Here we go,” Luke said, and his grenade launcher went off with a ‘chunk’, and an instant later an explosion flashed in the center of the open space, blue flame sending yellow shards flying off of something out of sight.

“Cover me!” Angel said, at about the same time as a red bomb, responding to Lukes shot, exploded on the wall outside the opening.

“Bro wait,” Nova yelled, but Angel was already sprinting out into the shaft. He shot the ground at his feet with his shotgun, which to Gradie’s surprise, shot him up into a high jump.

“What the fuck!” Luke said, laughing, as he launched grenades at seemingly random places.

“Cover him! Cover him!” Nova screamed, firing his sniper as fast as he could, which was not very fast. Gradie, trigger finger itching from the sounds of shooting echoing down the hall for the past five minutes, sprinted up to the opening and aimed out at the three walls that he could see.

He was just in time to watch Angel land dead center in the pit Luke’s bomb had carved out of the center of the rising yellow block, fire another round at his feet, and launch himself at a purple chunk of wall directly across from them. He fired again while still in the air, blasting a man-sized pit in the wall, and landed inside it, pressing himself as flat as he could, looking like a green stain on the purple square. Projectiles of all colors followed him the entire way.

“Go! Go!” Nova yelled, still firing, but Luke was already sailing out towards the rising block. He had shot a bomb at his feet, and it had launched him about triple the height that Angel’s shotgun had, and as he arced through the air, he fired another three bombs before he landed on the block, and the rain of colored death lessened significantly.

But as Luke settled on the rising block, the formerly haphazard sprays of fire converged on him. He glanced up at the opening and caught Gradie’s eye, (or so it seemed in his mirrored shades) just for a moment, and that was all it took.

Gradie stepped up to the opening and lay into everything with his plastic AR, and immediately felt another gaping difference between Gunmaze and the Hardworlds. The experience was purely analog, hollow, unresponsive somehow. At first, feeling confused him, but as he squeezed the trigger over and over, it clicked. In the Hardworlds, and even in the Vault sims meant to simulate them, there had been a responsiveness in his gunfire beyond the physical interaction between flesh and metal. Though he hadn’t ever noticed it at the time, he was now sure that his Spirit had been subtly pushing on the Hardworlds with every shot, altering reality just slightly. Here in Gunmaze, the game wasn’t up for debate.

Another more minor difference, was that the sound was anemic, the feeling impotent, compared to the echoes of gunfire and whispers of recoil in his head, and for a moment he was sure the enemies would laugh and gun him down, but instead he got one toy soldier looking mother fucker with a full burst of maroon tracers and his rainbow colored friends disappeared behind the balcony.

It took a moment, by which time Gradie had already moved on to firing at other barely visible targets, for him to notice that the guy he had shot had turned white and disintegrated in a burst of white light.

“Jump bro!” It was Nova, who at some point had made it onto the rising block, where Luke and Angel squatted and fired as fast as their triggers would let them.

As colored things of all kinds whizzed by around him and broke aparpt pieces of the hallway like glass, Gradie took a few steps backwards, then stomped forward in a rushed sprint and jumped out the opening, his leap taking him much farther and straighter than any long jump in the real world ever could, as if this places gravity had sensed his intention and suddenly loosened up.

As he sailed through the air, he realized the battle raging in the shaft was much larger than he had expected. Rather than there being only a few other levels above and below them, each holding about five or so enemies trying to shoot them, as he had imagined, there were at least ten levels in either direction, fading into soft blue light above and dark shadow below, each belching colored beams and bursts and blasts everywhere. He stared at it all, open mouthed, until something whizzed by his head. A burst of orange gunfire.

Another side effect of the game’s flexible physics was that he could easily turn and fire as he sailed through the air. He held down the trigger and fanned the balcony across from him, where another AR gunner and a sniper were trying to track his flight, but weren’t quite leading him enough. He sprayed their alcove and they dove to cover. A blue bomb sailed past him and exploded two levels up, sending a green body flying that disintegrated midair.

Holy shit, this is awesome.

He turned back to platform and landed in a combat roll next to Luke. For a split second, they smiled at each other.

“This shit is…” Gradie started, but was cut off by a solid yellow beam that bloomed out of his upper left peripherals and glowed just under his chin.

The world froze, then turned completely black and white, and he fell right through it at near instantaneous speed. He zipped down through the platform and everything else in a fraction of a second, his body glowing and blinding him, like he had been turned into light and bounced off a mirror.

Then everything was silent, and he was standing in a solid white room, with just enough shadow over everything to give him a general idea of the forms. His hands still clutched his rifle, though he was now in a standing position, and the rifle and his arms were now the same white as everything else.

“Fight!” a voice said from the ceiling, and something moved on the edge of the room.