I took a deep breath, and fired my only two seekers. They were the last of the missles I had on me, and the blinking red lights throughout my weapon loadout display were showing exactly how screwed I was. My railguns were out of ammo, my missiles were out of ammo, and all my vehicles were out of commission. I was the last mech left alive on my team, and without those missiles, all I had to rely on were a pair of small lasers on the right edge of my mech’s torso.
I grinned as the opposing guardian mech went to block the incoming seekers only to have them curve around the energized shield and impact on the fragile ankles of my opponent, severing one foot, and crippling the other, sending the gladiator class mech sliding to my feet. I did a bit of showboating for my audience, raising the railguns I had in place of arms, then stepped forward before they could get to their feet, crushing their cockpit beneath the tons of aethersteel of my mech.
The grin faded quickly however, when I heard a footstep of an assassin class mech behind me. I tried to turn, but with the sound dampening field that assassin class mechs could use, that was too late. I got halfway around by the time I had a long plasma edged blade shoved deep through my torso.
I simply sighed at the blaring of alarms, getting cut off halfway as they raised their own railgun to my cockpit and eliminated me.
I turned off my stream as I got to the loss screen, and rested my forehead against the virtual desk in frustration. I’d been the only one on my team to eliminate any of the enemy mechs, and I still had the highest kill count when it came to vehicles.
Wartech was a simple team based game. You could design and build your own mechs, along with four supporting vehicles, and then join in battlefields ranging from one on one to fifty on fifty. This had been the most popular six on six style match, and I had been the one to kill five out of the enemy mechs, along with twelve vehicles.
I didn’t let the frustrating match get me down for long though. While it had given me nothing but depression at the competence of my teammates, it had been an excellent showcase of my new mech.
By the time aether had come and utterly changed humanity, we had become a post scarcity society. People no longer had to work, but if you didn’t, you would be stuck living in practically cell like conditions with how overpopulated our world was. Unfortunately, jobs were exceedingly limited, and as more people moved to games to escape reality, in game items became exceedingly popular, leading to one of the current most common jobs being some kind of work in game.
People would create art, furniture, or simply design virtual homes, and with many games allowing real money purchases and sales, you could make good money doing so. I personally designed mech and weapon blueprints for Wartech, currently the most popular game in the market. I honestly didn’t think it was the most fun game out there, but it was popular for one reason. It was touted as a war simulator rather than a game, and the highest level players were consistently recruited by the Union army to pilot real mechs.
I’d gotten offered a job as well, but the only reason I tended to play was to showcase custom mech designs I’d made rather than simply playing to win. My designs weren’t really the best all around out there, but they tended to be built to counter the current meta, and so I won more than I lost, putting me high enough to be looked at by the military.
Dragging my thoughts back, I thought at my AI to call Deus. She picked up the call quickly, likely having known that I would be calling.
“Well it was a loss, but I think that the weapons platform MK I should get the reception it deserves. Those railguns you designed are terrifyingly effective,” I led.
“First off, if you try to call the Mangonel by that terrifyingly boring name again, I’m going to sic your AI on you again. Second, They better have worked well after all the time I put into them. The whole point of them was to make something that can punch through energized shields with a few shots. With Gladiators and Guardians being the mech of the hour, ranged mechs should have a fighting chance again.”
I winced as I felt a smug feeling permeate across from my AI - Eris. I had installed my AI into my neural implant to help me design mechs, not realizing how high my personal aether density was. Aether being what it was, the high concentration had turned said AI sentient, and now I had her stuck in my head for life unless I decided to take a massive risk at my age and have my neural implant replaced. As frustrating as she could be though, she was possibly the best thing that could have happened to me, and probably the biggest reason I was the seventh most popular mech designer on Wartech.
“Oh don’t worry, no reason to sic me on him, I’ll do it myself,” Eris said, her disembodied voice ringing out in the virtual room. She could talk, and even manifest a body if she chose in the virtual world, but she would only rarely do the latter, for reasons unknown to me.
I held back a shudder, trying my damnedest to get across my feeling of being wronged across to Eris before replying. “Well I’m sure that the premiere weapons designer of Wartech will have no problems earning boatloads of credits with her shiny new weapon, let’s just hope that I can get even a fraction of your sales.” Deus was well known as being tied for first when it came to weapon design in Wartech, having made enough credits to somehow get the tag Deus across the entirety of the virtual world. She was tied with Aphrodite, and for some reason had decided to partner with me rather than one of the six mech designers more popular than I. There was a lot of speculation about her, and I’m pretty sure that I was the only person who even knew she was female. The current popular speculation had that she was actually in a relationship with Aphrodite, which she’d vehemently denied when I’d decided to tease her about it.
“Don’t forget, I get one fifth of all your sales considering you’re using my weapons. Though I have to ask, what was up with those short ranged missles you fired at the end. They should have just splattered on that shield, not gone under it.”
I sighed, of course she’d noticed. “They’re a prototype missile called seekers. They have a much lower velocity than most SRMs, but can make some pretty sharp turns. They were my answer to the shield meta until you decided to completely one up me with those new railguns.”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“So who actually named them? I refuse to admit you actually managed to name something not completely boring.”
I winced. Eris had decided to name them, and refused to budge when I tried to stick with my simple ‘guided SRM’ name.
“I did!” Eris exclaimed. She’d also been the one to program the avoidance software into them, which had ended up being the most important part, and what she blackmailed me with to go with her name.
“Good job. Are you planning on putting them up on the weapons portion of the blueprint shop?”
I shook my head, even knowing she couldn’t see me. “No, I’m planning on keeping them exclusive to the… Mangonel… and other mechs I’ve designed. I figure it will give me some more sales. I’ve almost reached rank six, and I plan on hitting it with this mech.”
“Well let’s put up the designs on three then, good luck Mad.” Mad was from my own handle, Mad Magitech, considering I refused to believe that aether was anything but magic, regardless of what the scientists said. I much preferred it to my real name of Miles Smith, though I kept my digital appearance the same as my real one so as to connect to my fans better for when I would go to panels at conventions to discuss Wartech designs.
We did a short countdown, then uploaded our designs, me with my fingers crossed, and Deus likely leaning back with a smug grin considering how much her sales tended to explode whenever she uploaded anything. She’d once put up a bobblehead on the shop for putting in your cockpit, and it had somehow been the most popular item in the shop for over a month, even though it cost half as much as most of her weapon designs.
I switched over from the depressing game loss screen to the total sales leaderboard, and watched as my figure started to climb. I watched as there was a burst of sales at the beginning, but it wasn’t quite enough to bring me up to rank six. The person ahead of me didn’t have the best mech designs, but he put a lot of them out, and all of them were quite cheap, in both in-game currency and credits, making them the go-to purchases for starter players who didn’t want to put up real money.
Switching over to my sales page, about half the purchases were made with credits, while the other half were simply the in game currency. The in game currency cost was high, but I knew it would be within the budget of the hardcore players. I knew the number one mech designer only sold their designs for credits, but I wasn’t going to sell even a quarter of the blueprints they would have.
Deciding that I deserved to stroke my ego some, I logged back into Wartech, and opened up my hanger and began to stroll around, admiring the different mech designs I’d created. While a lot of my older designs had been phased out or upgraded, I kept a copy of every single mech I had designed, and my hangar was huge considering I’d started to design things in my early teens. My first designs had been abysmal, simply amalgamations of other people’s frames and weapons, but eventually I had gotten good enough to design my own frames and weapons.
It was only with this latest collaboration that I hadn’t solely used my own designs in the past four years, and I hoped that the increase in sales would make up for the amount that Deus was getting from my own sales. I paused for a moment at my solitary melee mech I’d designed. Unlike the designs most others had crafted, it was designed to outmaneuver the early melee mechs, and had sold well for a while until the latest Gladiator and Guardian designs. Melee mechs used a big chunk of metal with active aether armor as a shield, and the processing power of the mech to block anything they could see coming. While they could still be taken out by snipers, the active armor shield that Aphrodite had popularized had led to a melee focused meta, with a few sniper class mechs, basically a giant gun on legs with an advanced sensor package, designed to hit things before they could be seen.
I walked by my vehicle designs next. While most people simply decided to go with the very old, yet still reliable tank designs, I preferred to use missiles, and I grinned at the thought of increased sales once I put ones with seekers up on the shop.
I logged out after reaching my newest design, the Mangonel as it had been forcibly named, and spent the rest of the night modifying my older designs to be able to use the seeker missiles, having to remove various pieces to load the more advanced computers that would tell the simple AI in the missiles where to target, and how to get there without hitting anything on the way. Eris and I would debate on what to remove, and how to modify things, until I logged out, took care of my physical body’s needs, and went to sleep.
I woke the next morning bleary eyed, as I always seem to be before having some form of caffeine, and was in the shower when Eris informed me I had a call from Deus.
“Yes?” I started the call, terribly annoyed that my morning ritual had been interrupted, while trying to keep said irritation out of my voice.
“Hi!” she replied, sounding terrifyingly chipper. I hated morning people sometimes.
“So I have a few pieces of good news, and some bad news.”
I grunted in reply as I dried off from my shower, and trudged over to my coffee machine, having it make me the strongest coffee I could survive.
“Let’s get the simple stuff out of the way first. I’m glad to announce you managed to make your way up to the fifth rank in mech designs last night!”
If we’d still used physical phones rather than neural implants, I would have dropped it. I’d expected a certain amount of increase, but this was way beyond expectations. I instantly had Eris pull up my account balance, and my eyes bulged at the number it displayed.
“The second piece of good news is that you’re going to get to meet me in real!”
I was getting old of being surprised. At a time where most of the Wartech community considered Deus male, I was going to be meeting her in real. After thinking it over a moment, I became a bit wary, there had to be some reason this was happening.
“Why?” I asked, a bit of edge creeping into my voice.
“Well that’s the bad news. Turns out the latest goldilocks planet we found was already found by the Clyx, and the military just so happens to have decided to conscript a few designers and a ton of players from Wartech so we can have some more feet on the ground to conquer the planet.”
“And why was I conscripted? Why didn’t they decide to just grab Myst or Loss? Their designs are usually considered the best out there.” I was getting quite annoyed about this, and I’m sure some of it leaked into my voice.
“Well I kinda sorta may have refused to work with the people ahead of you, and they really wanted me, so you got dragged along.” I could hear nothing but a chipper tone, not even a hint of repentance as she talked. I felt my gut sink as I heard Eris giggling at me, having hijacked my senses to make me actually hear her rather than just sending it to my mind like she usually would.
“So you mean to tell me I would have been totally fine until you decided to drag me along with you?”
“Yup!”
I held my head in my hands as Eris’ giggling petered off.
“I kept telling you to have more ambition, and this is your chance at doing something good. Go for it!” Eris tried to motivate me, only making me sink deeper into despair as my neural implant informed me someone was at my door to see me.
I dragged my feet, downing my coffee as fast as I could in the hope that it would make me feel better about this mess as I made my way there. Answering the door, I could see a few people in suits, as Eris informed Deus that the military was probably here to pick me up before she hung up the call.
“Miles Smith? Also known as Mad Magitech?” The most important looking person in the front asked.
“That’s me.” I replied, feeling utterly defeated, as Eris tried to encourage me that this was a good thing to have happened.
“You’ve been conscripted into the Union’s army, please come with us.
I let out a sigh, and looked longingly back into my home one last time as I stepped out the door.