“The world is full of suffering, then you die.”
GTA Vice City Stories
ON MONDAY Hagen went to the clinic to tell the doctor about his inexplicable hallucinations. The doctor hummed and hawed in a bewildered way for a while, and then told him to get an MRI. It didn’t find any pathological symptoms related to Hagen's brain. Therefore, the doctor's diagnosis was “stress from overwork.” He prescribed him a course of mild sedatives and recommended him to take a break from work.
His employers didn't mind — it was the first vacation Mike had taken in three years, so he suddenlybecame free for three weeks. As Hagen was leaving the shop, he saw Mr. Goretsky looking for his notebook and not finding it. “I really wouldn't advise you to visit any illegal sites within the next three weeks,” he thought with pure Schadenfreude.
A system message popped up in the air right above Goretsky.
Gregor “Moose” Goretsky. Age: 38
Level 4
HP: 22000
Battles/victories: 9/6
Weight: 251 lbs
Height: 6’ 3”
Hell's bells! was the first thought to cross Mike's mind. Five times my HP!
Goretsky's Stamina equaled 16. However, Hagen didn't manage to check out any other stats. He tried to open the window with the big man's profile, but the system kept sending him the same incomprehensible message:
The current level of your Insight skill is insufficient to access the information you’ve requested.
He had never come across this skill before but he decided to definitely sort it out later on.
Mike could already see he didn’t stand a chance against the man. Even given his double damage, he'd have to deal an opponent like this around eighty punches minimum, which was simply a non-option.
“So there you are, shithead!”
Hagen was so lost in his thoughts he missed the fact that Mr. Goretsky had finally found him. He loomed over Mike, who had hunched his back by sheer force of habit, grinning at him lopsidedly. “Get your finger out and give my laptop back, you dumbass!”
Hagen tried to make his face look as friendly as possible.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Goretsky!”
“If you try my patience for another three minutes, it won't be as good for you! Get my laptop back at once! This time we'll examine it carefully to see just how well you fixed it!”
“I'm on vacation, Mr. Goretsky. Please address one of my colleagues with this issue.”
Hagen kept thinking about how much he'd have to level up his Punch skill to knock out a giant like the Moose with a single blow. Math had always been a strong suit of Mike's, so he instantly made the calculation: he'd have to level up to 160, which would take him some ten years of daily twelve-hourpractice. However, he was basing his calculations on his current level of Strength, which could be leveled up as well...
“Hey, you little geek! Did your brain freeze? Do I have to punch your lights out to reboot you, slowpoke?”
Hagen came back to his senses only to see Goretsky's face a few inches from his own. He was getting a full load of spittle on his nose alongside the barrage of expletives.
Hagen wiped his face automatically. Other sales personnel and a few customers came out as they heard the shouting, but no one made any effort to intervene even though they observed the tableau with some concern. Someone called the manager.
Mike gathered up what remained of his self-esteem and said, his voice quavering with hurt, “I'm sorry, Mr. Goretsky, but you should stop giving me all that verbal abuse. I am technically not a DigiMart employee at the moment, since I am on vacation. Please try another colleague of mine.”
“Are you that dumb? I don't give a shit!” Goretsky spat out. “You work at the shop, I gave you my laptop. So you're the one who’s supposed to fix it, and you're the one responsible!”
“I am sorry, Mr. Goretsky,” said Lexie, the senior sales executive. “Allow me to serve you.” She took the Moose by the arm. “Just give me your receipt, and I'll fetch the appliance in question at once.”
The Moose looked at Lexie with appreciation and grinned. He was certainly pleased by the replacement.
“You're lucky to have such cute girls work at your store, you slug,” were the Moose's parting words to Hagen.
Lexa gave Mike a barely noticeable gesture as she turned her head around and led the boorish customer away, allowing him to leave. Mike nodded in response and headed toward the exit, feeling the blood rush to his face and ears.
“None of this is ever, ever, ever likely to end well,” he kept muttering.
It was bad luck indeed for the peak of his humiliation to have coincided with the arrival of Lexie —the only co-worker who'd never treated Hagen like a piece of shit. She appreciated him for his ability to find any defect in any computer in a minimum amount of time, and always managed to find a kind word for him, praising him for his work. She was three years younger than him, after all, and already a senior sales executive. Really pretty, too. Such a pity he had no chance with her.
And still he forgot all about Lexie once he got outside. Hagen now had a goal, digitized and perfectly understandable.
His greatest desire ever was to learn to fight now — a desire even greater than that he'd felt for Jessie after their first date. Actually, it wasn't even fighting that he wanted. It would be painful, after all. What he'd ever really wanted was to knock out any opponent with a single punch without letting the fight go on for too long. Just like that Irish Traveler Mickey did in Guy Ritchie’s movie. His endurance wasn't that great, after all. Hagen imagined Goretsky punching him on the nose and shuddered.
After the night Mike spent leveling up his Punch ability, he only woke up in the late afternoon. He was completely exhausted, for every muscle in his untrained body ached. His mood, however, was unexpectedly good. He tried to level up the ability, but his body reacted with acute pain. Mike didn't know what to do, so he kept on studying the interface.
His eyes rolled maniacally when he noticed another couple of icons he’d not seen before. He stared at them and “dragged and dropped” them onto the panel. One of them had the legend saying “Program Features.” When Hagen opened it, he saw the following.
Augmented Reality!7.2 Home Edition
Copyright © First Martian Company, Ltd. 2101-2118
All rights reserved
Registered owner: Michael Björnstad Hagen.
S/N S2L-7702B-1412010
One-year single user license
Account type: Premium
Activation date: 04/24/2018, 09:00
Expiration date: 04/24/2019, 08:59
A Google search revealed nothing about either the First Martian Company or the Augmented Reality! platform. However, it didn't take Hagen long to figure things out. He'd read too many comics to be surprised by something like this. It was pretty obvious: he’d somehow acquired an augmented reality interface from the future. Just how it had happened didn't matter at the moment. Mike could easily imagine every Earthling having an interface of this sort in the twenty-second century. Judging by the name of the company that had developed it, every Martian would have them, too.
The main thing he realized was as follows: time, too, was at a premium. He'd have to make full use of each and every day to make his dream come true.
He spent about an hour exploring the Settings tab to configure the interface just the way he liked it. There were lots of cool little features, including a built-in alarm clock that would wake you gently during your lightest sleep stage when waking up would be the least stressful, as well as making all sorts of data visible in one's field of view. The latter included quite a few useful things — the time, one's heartbeat rate, the temperature outside, calories used up since awakening, and lots more that one could theoretically look up on one's smartphone, but the augmented reality interface made it so much easier.
Mike also brought the progress bars of the main stats into his field of vision — namely, Strength, Agility, and Stamina. He spent about half an hour shadowboxing, trying to disregard the pain, and noticed that they had grown as well. Not at the same rate as the Punch ability, but it was something nevertheless.
He had the most success with Stamina. Hagen noticed that it would build up the most rapidly when he trained when his staying power was at his lowest — when he'd have to gasp for breath, trying to overcome the pain in his chest and the feeling of heaviness in his shoulders.
There were two more main icons — Check for Updates and Tech Support, but whenever he'd tap on either, they'd give the following error message:
Impossible to establish connection with the updates server.
It appears to be unavailable.
Please check your Universal Infospace connection settings.
Universal infospace? For real? A future internet?
If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Once Hagen had finished exploring the interface, he got back to his training. He put on a music channel on the TV and went on with kicking seven shades of shit out of his invisible opponent, imagining it to be Goretsky. He kept at it until late night when he reached a state of complete exhaustion. He took a shower and slept through the day; he probably wouldn't wake even if someone set his bed on fire.
This was his Sunday. He visited the clinic on Monday, then kept on shadowboxing at home, trying to progress as fast as possible. Tuesday was spent in the exact same manner. Wednesday evening Hagensuddenly had a bright idea and made a discovery.
He used a pillow from his sofa to form a punch bag of sorts, hanging it on the hook to replace the rather tasteless painting portraying a female gorilla in an evening dress and a hat. The name of the painting was Sunset on the Atlantic Coast, but it was all tacky rectangles in psychedelic colors. Hagen could never see the sunset — just the gorilla.
It turned out that the ability leveled up much faster if he punched the pillow instead of the air.
By the end of the same day, Hagen leveled up his Punch ability to Level 8 and became capable of dealing up to 1600 damage points, since his Power finally leveled up as well. That was when he realized that his best bet would be to train at a boxing gym. There was one just downed the street, owned by an old Mexican.
* * *
HAGEN TURNED UP at the Roosevelt Street boxing gym early on Sunday. Mr. Guillermo Ochoa didn't bat an eyelid when the puny lad arrived at his gym. In fact, Mr. Ochoa stayed as cool as a cucumber even when Hagen declared his intent to train at the gym. However, when this feeble hobbit whom you could pierce with a straw, with his pencil neck, messy fair hair, colorless fair eyebrows and eyelashes, made it clear he wished to train for at least twelve hours every day, it was too much for old Ochoa. He started to laugh out loud.
The young man didn't seem perturbed by it. He patiently waited for the boxing gym's owner to finish laughing, his cerulean blue eyes staring directly at Ochoa without one iota of irritation. He was irritated, though. The old man was seventy years old, and he could read people well enough. The Mexican laughed so hard that snot flew from his large broken nose. But the young man stayed perfectly calm, regardless.
Once the old man had stopped laughing, Hagen took a wad of crumpled dollar bills out of his back pocket. “Would this be enough for the first month, Mr. Ochoa?”
The old man got serious. He counted the money and nodded. “This will be enough for three months. And if you help me with cleaning the gym every evening, you can train for half a year,” Ochoa offered him his hand. “Welcome to my boxing gym, kid... Eh, what's your name, then?”
“Mikey,” said the young man as he shook the Mexican's hand. “But you can call me Hagen, if you like.”
“So, it's Little Mikey, then? All right. When would you like to get started? If you think that-”
“Could I start right now?” Hagen interrupted him.
The old man chuckled. “Right now?”
“Yes, right now,” the hobbit repeated.
Ochoa scrutinized Mike from head to toe, gave a whistle, then swept his hand theatrically around the empty gym. “The gym is all yours, young man! The locker room is that way.”
Hagen may have imagined it, but it seemed like there was something respectful in the way the old man addressed him. That was the first time in his life someone's ever spoken to him that way, and he liked it.
Five minutes later, having changed, Hagen started throwing punches at the punch bag with enormous enthusiasm. The huge aloha shorts that hung below his knees revealed legs so thin one could circle one's fingers around them. The oversize tee sleeves reached all the way down to his elbows, and his clumsy punches couldn't move the bag an inch. Nothing but the sullen look in his fierce blue eyes could convince anyone that puny Little Mickey was really meaning it.
So, by the end of the day, Ochoa took pity of the lad and started to teach him how to punch for real.
* * *
BY THE END of the second week at the gym, Hagen's physical and mental condition had improved considerably. As it had turned out, his Premium account came with a triple leveling booster to all skills and stats. Mike found out about it in the Help section. The virtual helper was miles ahead of Siri. It had no problems with recognizing voice commands, and responded immediately. This is how Hagen found out that whenever a battle ability reached a level divisible by ten, he would get an extra skill. Punch, for example, would give him a 50% chance of canceling any of his opponent's blocks at Level 10. By level 30, this would be guaranteed.
At any rate, Hagen saw it for himself by the end of the first week of training, when his only ability finally reached Level 10.
Apart from the boxing ring and the boxing bag, Ochoa's gym turned out to have barbells and dumbbells. That's what the old man made him use on the second day, teaching him a few exercises that would develop different muscle groups. Aided by an intense workout routine with weights, this trainingmade his Strength grow much faster and gave him an enormous appetite.
Hagen consumed huge amounts of meat, chicken, and fish; then it dawned on him that he could just buy an enormous jar of powdered protein. He'd been drinking at least three protein shakes every day since, not to mention eating regular food. Training made him hungry all the time, even at night — he would wake up and make himself a shake which he'd gulp down and fall asleep again.
In two weeks, he gained a couple of pounds and even managed to grow taller, for whatever reason.
By the end of his leave, his stats were as follows:
Mike “Crybaby” Hagen. Age: 29
Level 1
HP: 9000
Battles/victories: 0/0
Weight: 135 lbs
Height: 5’ 3”
Main stats:
Strength: 5
Agility: 4
Stamina: 9
Hagen managed to level up all his stats and put on eleven pounds. He became stronger, and the beefed-up Stamina increased his chances to survive, giving him more time to throw a game-changing punch. The only stat that grew very slowly was Agility.
He didn't discover any new moves, so he decided to focus on leveling up Punch, the only ability in his arsenal. No matter how his opponent would dodge, Hagen's higher level would eventually let him throw lightning-fast punches no one could possibly escape.
Punch: Level 16
Damage: 8000
+50% to the probability of ignoring any block
You have to use the ability more often to level it up
This amazing ability to do damage was a direct result of his increased Strength. At Level 1, Hagen would only manage to deal 1600 points of damage (a hundred points for every level of the ability). But those 1600 points became multiplied by five, and eight thousand points were already something. He could knock himself out in a punch or two, regardless of his leveled-up Stamina. As for his older self — the one that didn't have the interface — he could swat it like a fly.
On the last day of his leave, Hagen approached the owner of the gym. “My time off is about to end, Mr. Ochoa. I have to go back to work. As soon as I finish in the evening, I'll be right here.”
The old man shrugged. “You can come whenever you want, kid.”
“Thank you, Mr. Ochoa! I'm done for today...”
“Hold on a second, kid,” Guillermo interrupted him, pointing to the corner of the gym where a Latino guy with a nondescript face was shadowboxing. “How about a match with Juan? He's a newbie, too, although he's been here for over half a year. But he doesn't do it the way you do. He comes around three times a week, and sometimes skips his training altogether. Everybody else I have here is tough as nails, and I can't find him a proper partner for the life of me.”
“We can try,” said Hagen, shrugging.
He took a closer look at Juan and saw the following:
Juan Manuel Guerrero. Age: 26
Level 3
HP: 13000
Battles/victories: 7/5
Weight: 172 lbs
Height: 6 foot
“All right. Wait,” Ochoa said and went toward Mike's sparring-partner-to-be.
“This guy won't be easy meat,” thought Hagen to himself as he saw Juan Guerrero looking in his direction. Guerrero was strong, with long arms, and half as many HP as Hagen. But one had to start somewhere, after all. He couldn't just beat up old ladies in the street to level up, could he?
Once the ongoing bout was over, Ochoa told the sparring partners to leave the boxing ring and invited Guerrero and Hagen to take their place. They bumped their boxing gloves together. Guerrero nodded, and Hagen returned the nod.
“Ready? Fight!” Ochoa gave the command.
The training fight began.
Guerrero was circling around Hagen, trying to get on his left side but keeping his distance. Should he move closer? He might get hit. Should he wait for his opponent to attack? In that case, would it be possible to block or dodge the punch?
Hagen kept on circling and trying to stay face to face with his opponent who kept running around. He waited for his chance. A chance to deal a blow that might be his only opportunity in this fight.
“Come on!” shouted Ochoa, trying to motivate the fighters. “Fight! Get on with it!”
Hagen's opponent started to attack. He moved his body around a lot to confuse the other fighter. But then came the moment when Hagen realized he had to strike. He intuitively threw a punch at the face of the attacker without even realizing what he was doing, trying to block Guerrero's punch with his left hand at the same time. He nearly felt the other man's boxing glove touch his, but then the contact was lost.
You’ve dealt damage: 8,000 (Punch)
Your opponent’s block has been overridden
Later, Mike would see the next scene in his dreams in slo-mo for a couple of nights in a row. There's him throwing the punch; there's the fist that goes right through the poorly-executed counter-punch blockand then proceeds to hit Guerrero right on the jawbone. His opponent's head comes upwards first, inertia making a trail of sweat drops in the air, and then the other man's feet leaves the floor as well.
That was how Hagen found out that if his strike dealt more damage than 50% of his opponent's HP, a knockout was guaranteed. That's exactly what happened to Guerrero. He was knocked out all right.
Hagen himself felt a rush of unbelievable pleasure. This was better than any orgasm. That was how the System reacted to his first level-up.
Hagen was standing inside a column of light invisible to anyone but himself. He didn't hear whatOchoa was saying. However, he could clearly see the following system message:
Congratulations! You’ve defeated your opponent in a fair fight!
Defeating an opponent whose level is higher than yours doubles the XP received!
You’ve received +2 to your level!
Current level: 3
New system points of main characteristics available: 2
New system points of combat skills available: 2
As he went to bed that night, Hagen consulted with the virtual assistant and distributed the system points between Strength and Agility. First he wanted to dump both into Strength, but it turned out that leveling up a stat by more than one point at once would be lethally dangerous. The system gave an absolutely clear warning about that.
Warning! We’ve detected an abnormal increase of your Strength characteristic: +1 pt.
Your body will be restructured in keeping with the new reading (6) to comply with your new metabolism and chronotropy values.
Changes required: accelerated growth of muscle tissue, sinews and ligaments.
There was also a lot of stuff about raising the levels of intramuscular phosphocreatine, glycogen, the internal mechanisms, intramuscular coordination, and so on. However, there was a very clear warning in bold at the very bottom:
Warning!
The restructuring of your body functions requires a considerable amount of nutrients. In order to avoid danger to your life, you’re strongly encouraged to consume a minimum of 10 oz. animal protein, 3 lbs. of carbohydrates and 3 oz. of animal fats. A shortage of nutrients may result in body function failure.
Warning!
Artificial characteristic boosting of more that 1 pt. at a time is strictly forbidden! Severe danger of fatality!
A similar system message and warning followed when he added an extra point to Agility:
Warning! We’ve detected an abnormal increase of your Agility characteristic: +1 pt.
Your body will be restructured in keeping with the new reading (5) to comply with your new motoric and coordination values.
Changes required: the restructuring of your central nervous system and the increase in elasticity of your muscle tissue, sinews, ligaments and joints.
The warning of a possible lethal outcome followed this, too — as well as advice to eat as much protein, fat, and carbohydrates as possible, accompanied by proper hydration.
So Hagen consumed an enormous amount of fried chicken and a few pizzas over the next two hours, washing them down with plenty of soda and water.
As he was eating, he suddenly realized he was no longer frightened of fighting Mr. Goretsky. As his Strength stat had grown, he could deal 9,600 points of damage which was more than enough to knock out the Moose, the required amount being 50% of the latter's HP.
Then he fell asleep, smiling all the way to the Land of Nod. Tomorrow would be the next day — the first day of the rest of his life.
He would keep on training and leveling up, and eventually take part in an MMA competition, and then... Who knows? Perhaps, one day he might hold his champion's belt proudly above his head.
But that would take time. And as for tomorrow...
Hagen smiled again. Tomorrow he’d finally ask Lexie to hang out with him.