“So, what’s your horse’s name?”
“My what now?” Farrah asked, in between two huffs of a cigarette.
It was truly a mystery to Dan where she got enough of things to sustain her chain-smoking habits. He had considered asking her for one on more than one of those evenings by a dim campfire, that never stayed on long enough to keep them warm throughout the night. But he never had, knowing how some collectors got with their private property. And he couldn’t blame her. Not in a world where any kind of property was scarce.
“Your horse in this race,” He absent-mindedly zoomed in and out on the map in front of him.
Farrah had made him unlock 'Scan' on one of the first evenings of their travels. However, the white and black lines on the blue background were meaningless to him without labels. When he zoomed out enough, he could see black semi-circles, where the untrained skill had taken a bite out of the ambient fog of war. And right next to him, a blue dot was blowing white smoke into a white sky. The fact that Vega used cloaking made the skill all that more useless.
“Are you still waiting for me to elaborate?” He looked up at the woman from where he was sat against a tree. She gave him a half-arsed chuckle, before returning to reading something in front of her. “Why are you doing this?” Dan asked, his tone genuinely curious. Neither of the girls had really bothered explaining their motives. Neither of the girls were particularly talkative either, to be fair.
“Reading? Smoking? Babysitting?” She winked at the last one, finally dismissing the screen, and sliding down to crouch at eye-level with Dan.
“Why do you - you know very well what I mean.”
She hummed, and took a long drag, looking somewhere in the distance. Her profile against the white sky and grey fields painted a curious portrait. She was someone before the End. There was determination and drive behind her brown eyes that the past two years had failed to erase. She could have easily taken out the cheek and lip piercings, cut her hair, and embraced this new world. But she refused to or perhaps had never felt the need.
“Yeah, I do,” She eventually replied. “It’s my last quest. It’s what I’ve gotta do.”
“But why?” Dan insisted. There was something more to it, something worth the risk. Dan wanted to know what kind of a reward would send a greedy Collector on this wild goose chase. She knew too little and asked too few questions. “You’re clearly not doing this because you think you’ll be able to fix this System and cure the walkers. It’s not scientific curiosity about the System’s origin. So what’s the reward?”
Farrah extinguished her cigarette and buried the bud in the wet earth.
“There is no reward. I guess it’s the same reward as for anything we do in life; to live, to see another day.”
“Right,” Dan forced a chuckle. It wasn’t funny. And quickly he realised that she wasn’t joking. “If that’s your only quest, and you’ve mastered the three most dangerous domains, you can’t overload on goals, and there’s nothing out there that could kill you. Why do you bother following the System’s orders?”
Farrah dryly chuckled in reply. A breeze all too cold for this midsummer morning hastily carried her nostalgic smile away, shuffling the grain-grass as it did so.
“A friend of mine said almost those exact words to me once,” She turned to look Dan in the eyes, her arms folded over her knees, “Back then I replied that this was what we’ve always done. We set ourselves daily goals, we followed his plan. The System made life unfair, more dangerous, and doing these quests to keep up with it all is just our new routine.”
Dan’s lips twisted in a sneer of disgust. He was meant to be lenient with other people’s actions, especially considering she, and the red-eye blond, were limited to 5 goals per day. But still. She was a murderer. All the Collectors were.
“Okay,” Farrah rolled her eyes, “What are you judging me for? Surviving? Living? Grinding quests to keep myself alive, instead of relying on metal and brick to keep the zombies at bay twice a year?”
“Killing, mostly,” Dan dryly replied. “I haven’t told you this yet, but I tried to join your group.” She raised an eyebrow, and he corrected himself. “A Collector’s group.”
“Those are extremely inefficient for increasing mastery-”
He raised a hand in her direction, asking her to let him finish.
“One of the reasons we parted ways was because there were goals I couldn’t do. Ethically, I mean. The one to burn luck points, the double kill one… So, you, being religious and all that,” He gestured at her cross, “how can you justify taking a life to prologue your own?”
Farrah chuckled, seemingly genuinely amused. But, before she could reply, a familiar voice with its faint Mainland accent, came from behind him:
“And, umm, what would the other reasons be?”
Dan grabbed his chest, genuinely startled.
“Where did you come from?” He snapped, turning around.
The better question was where Vega had been, as she’d been gone too long for a loo break, not long enough to have done any recon, and had returned empty-handed, showing that she hadn’t scavenged anything from the four abandoned houses that waited for them some two kilometres ahead.
“Here,” Farrah got up and handed Vega a bowl of porridge stew that’d long since gotten as cold as the two metal bowls next to it.
Vega made a little ‘uh’ noise, and gestured not quite in the direction of the abandoning houses, before whispering something to Farrah.
Dan was just about getting fed up with these quiet exchanges. But there were almost at his bunker, so he swallowed down those feelings of rejection, and crossed his arms over his chest, waiting for Farrah to nod in response to words he wasn’t entitled to hear.
Vega then walked away, chewing on spoonfuls of cold, rubbery, porridge. She stopped within earshot. Clearly whatever she’d found was more urgent than prying into Daniel’s personal life, as she so often did. Not being able to fidget with her sleeves, she tapped her foot against a nearby tree as she ate.
“To answer your question,” Farrah continued, not bothering to sit down again, “I know which quest you’re referring to. And I really don’t care what you think of me, or how you judge my soul, because it’s not yours to judge. But I want you to know that had the roles been reversed that day, I would have begged her to let me turn instead. But sometimes morality becomes blurry. Is killing a zombie any different from killing a Man? Especially the ones who turned early on. They look just like people. I know I wondered more than once if they still had a soul.” She put a hand over her hip, and waited a few seconds, giving Dan the time to think and respond. He did the former, but never got to the latter. This close to his goal, getting into arguments wasn’t worth it. Farrah nodded, her frown showing that she wasn’t mistaking his silence for agreement. “You shouldn’t let the System decide for you who is a person, and who isn’t.” She concluded. “On a lighter note, there are no zombies ahead, and we can get to your coordinates by late afternoon. If you want, you can take a head start. We’ll clean up the dishes and catch up.”
Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.
“I can clean, you can go chat,” Daniel rolled his eyes, as he got up. “It’s fine, you don’t have to come up with excuses on my account.”
Farrah gave him a strange, almost resigned, smile, before heading towards Vega.
Dan briefly rekindled the fire they’d used to make breakfast, to heat up some water and clean the bowls. The third one was very promptly handed to him by Vega, followed by a quiet thank you. He watched as the blue dot quickly moved fifty or so meters away on his map. He didn’t look up to check where the girls had gone.
He disagreed with Farrah on her attitude. The System wasn’t perfect, he’d read the code, he knew it better than anyone. Perhaps that was also why he was in a unique position to know for certain that the zombies were no longer people. It was sad to think about how one’s life could be held in just over 600 lines stored on a server, in some probably waterlogged and zombie-filled bunker. But those 600 lines became 9 when a person’s status changed from alive to no longer so. That was something Farrah and her talks of an immortal soul could never understand.
Dan paused, a half-dirty bowl in his hands. People were more than code, he was more than those 600 lines – which in his case were actually over 700 due to his unique predicament. And yet, here he was, teaming up with a weirdo and an antisocial loner to get access to the admin password that would let him edit his own code. Would he still be a person then? If he were to change something that wasn’t his to change?
He returned to cleaning dry oats. He didn’t have the energy to think about that.
----------------------------------------
“Umm, so, about this quest,” Vega really didn’t know how to bring up the topic. It didn’t help that it’d been weeks since she joined Farrah, but she’d somehow never found the time to reply to any of Farrah’s questions about her System, or join in any of the conversations about quests that the woman so often held, sometimes with other Collectors, sometimes with herself.
Farrah nodded, inviting her to speak. Her expression was grim, and she kept glancing back, to the wooded strip where they’d camped that night, and where Daniel was currently packing.
Vega didn’t want to turn around to look at the man. The main issue with her quest was that there were no settlements nearby.
Noticing that she wasn’t ready to speak, Farrah started up the conversation:
“Listen, I’d appreciate if you stopped excluding him. I know you don’t like him. He can be abrasive, but we should keep these private conversations to the minimum.”
Vega pressed the corner of her lips up, in a half-smirk, unconvinced by Farrah’s words, before glancing to the ground, hoping to spot something among the tall grass that could be used as a segway into what she needed to say.
“It’s not that I don’t like him,” She tugged on the strap on her right wrist. The one on her left was long gone. She thought Dan was cute and under different circumstances, she would have actually bothered to reply to any of his weird questions about things she didn’t remember, didn’t want to talk about, or movies she hadn’t seen. “It’s that he doesn’t like me.”
“Tough luck,” Farrah patted the side of Vega’s shoulder. “He hates me too.”
“True,” Vega chuckled. “At least we have each other,” She looked up at Farrah with a soft smile, losing herself in her brown eyes for the briefest of moments. “But the thing, umm,” she quickly snapped back to the present, “Those quests I keep telling you about, umm, the ones you called ‘overflow’ once,” Farrah frowned, and nodded, encouraging Vega to continue with a hum, “I get three daily. They’re fine. Like, pushups, killing some monsters, fasting, umm, you saw me do a few…”
“Uh-uh,” Farrah nodded. She looked a bit up, not quite at Vega, clearly thinking back to the examples she was describing.
“I usually do them, umm, while on supply runs so I don’t bother you. And if I don’t do them, this bar fills up,… umm…”
“Yeah, up to a maximum of 5, then you need to burn a Luck point to reset it.” Farrah nodded.
“Well I can’t, I told you I don’t have Luck,” Vega replied. “They used to have this device that reset it, but now, with everything Daniel told us, I’m not sure it still exists.” She glanced up at Farrah, who seemed to be in thought, as she remembered that Farrah didn’t know the full extent of her bond to OBELISK. She didn’t doubt the woman’s ability to put it together, but thankfully she’d missed that key piece that was her medical file. So, she elaborated. “OBELISK. They are the ‘they’ I just mentioned.”
“So you want to go look for this device once we get to the complex?”
“I don’t think it will be there. If Daniel was right about it having become a lair, well, umm…” She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to get her hopes up. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to pay the price of having that bar reset. There were very few things she could still feel, and the electric pain that came from her nervous system being activated all at once was not something she sought out.
“I’ll have a look. I’ll rig ‘Scan’ like I did for the factory.” Farrah nodded, taking a step forward, towards the camp.
“You’ll, umm, waste power,” Vega argued.
Farrah smiled and put both her hands on Vega’s shoulders.
“Even if I wasn’t in the triple digits, I’d still do it,” She promised with a nod.
She let go, but before she could take another step, Vega grabbed Farrah’s arm.
“I need to stab someone before midnight,” She blurted out. “That’s my quest.”
With a shaky breath, she made her screens appear. She knew Farrah couldn’t see it, and that the letters hadn’t changed since earlier that morning.
Stats
Skills
Goals
Other
Power
No skills requiring P active
P regeneration active
Available P:
Conditions
Daily goals
Stats
Skills
Goals
Other
Current Goals
· Inflict a [lethal] [knife wound] to a [alive] subject
Completed Goals
· Run [10] kilometers
· Consume [3] [poisonous] items
Reset in: 13:43:09
“Okay…” Farrah mumbled.
She thought something over, before making her map appear and disappear. Vega patiently waited for Farrah’s orders. She knew she’d sort out the problem. She turned around to look at Dan. There were options.
“What’s the exact phrasing?” Farrah asked.