“Come on, Alex. Let me in.” Rick pounded on the warehouse door, catching the attention of a nearby thirty-something man walking his dog down the street. “Come on,” he said more quietly, “I know you’re watching me on camera.”

Nothing happened. Was she not there? He shook his head. What’s the likelihood she’s ever not here? After all, he’d never seen her in person, and there had to be a reason.

The man and his dog passed and Rick waited until they were a ways down the street before he pounded again. “I already know a lot of the story. You don’t answer, I’m just gonna think you set me up, too.”

The door buzzed. Rick took a deep breath and walked inside. He trekked down the long halls toward the SR array where Alex had helped him train before Hector set up Rick’s apartment for him, but his confidence waned the deeper he got into the confining space. The ceiling was high, but if he had run from here, it wouldn’t be hard to block him in.

He pushed through the door to the room with the SR array. The entire kit was still there, and nothing looked out of sorts, which put Rick’s nerves at ease, though not entirely. He sat in the SR array’s recliner, but he didn’t plug in. “You up there?”

“I’m not up anywhere, Rick.” The tone of Alex’s voice was even, neither angry nor fearful.

“Ah, finally hear the sound of your voice.” Rick’s tone was not as even.

“Why didn’t you call me back, you dummy?”

He didn’t answer right away. He’d hoped something in the tone of her voice would give him a clue how he should proceed. He sighed. “You know I disconnected?”

There was a snort of surprised laughter, then, “That would have been hard to miss, but I don’t know why. There was a cheater in the game, but the match had already completed before they found him, so they didn’t disqualify the match.” There was a silence. “You have anything to do with that?”

Rick blew air out his mouth. “Pah! How the fuck would I have been able to do that from inside the game, Alex? I was running for my goddamned life in there.” He almost snarled the next part. “You’re gonna tell me you didn’t know Hector set me up?”

“What?” For the first time in the conversation, there was detectable emotion in her voice, and that emotion was surprise, or maybe indignation.

“He set me up with a wheresit cheat, but it was so easily detectable, it alerted the Ruckus Online anti-cheat bot the very first time I came into contact with a fighter bot. You didn’t notice me running my ass off trying to avoid the bots that swarmed me?”

“Wait, wait, wait. What?” She seemed genuinely shocked. “I saw you running, but I didn’t understand what was happening. I thought maybe the tech was fucking with your reCon.”

Rick’s face went from angry to shocked. “How do you know about the reCon?”

“Fuck.” There was silence, then a sigh. “I’ve always known about the reCon, Rick. Your reaction on that first day made it pretty obvious what it was.”

He tried to calm his breathing. “Does Hector know?”

“I don’t know. We’ve never discussed it. I figured if you wanted him to know, you’d have told him.”

If she was lying, she was doing it convincingly. His mind moved from one question to the next as he tried to figure out which one to ask first. The matter of his personal safety won out. “You knew about the reCon and you didn’t tell Hector?”

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

“I told you. Hector is a sociopath. You don’t let a man like that into your secrets if you can help it.”

She was right about that. He’d started out a courier, and though it paid little, his life had only gotten more complicated after he asked Hector to perform a procedure on his unconscious wife. A secret procedure.

Another question came to him. What’s he got on you? But he didn’t ask it. Instead, he said, “Hector had another player in the game.”

“How do you know all this? How did you detect the wheresit cheat if it was put on you without your knowledge? I don’t understand.”

“Every time I’ve told you about Ditto, you’ve dismissed it, but he’s the one who found it.”

“Ditto is real?” she asked.

“Why haven’t you listened when I told you he was real?”

She stuttered. “I—I thought he was an artifact of the reCon. I looked it up, and it’s not an uncommon aftereffect.”

That was true, though Rick had never had hallucinations. He’d considered himself lucky. Was Ditto a delusion, a ghost running around in his mutilated mind? He shook his head. How would a delusion have known so much about things he didn’t? More than that, how would his delusion have been able to talk to his wife? “No delusion. Kristina has talked to him.”

“Holy shit.” There was a shuffling sound that came over the mic. “Tell me what you think is happening and I’ll try to put it together for you.”

Rick sighed again. “Ditto alerted me to the wheresit cheat. He and Kristina tried to shut down the UPS so they could break away from the network. Safety protocol would have sent me to the black room, and I could have safely disconnected from there.”

“Okay, that makes sense. That what happened?”

“Fuck no, that’s not what happened. The UPS was in the laundry room, not even in my apartment. The kill switch was missing and the lid had been welded shut. Kristina had to emergency disconnect me.”

“Oh my God.”

“Took half a day till I could stand, and three days before I was well enough to leave the apartment.”

“That’s why you didn’t call back.” There was a relieved sigh through the mic. “You have no idea what sort of crazy ideas I had about what you and Hector might have been pulling on me.”

“Me and Hector?”

“What?” she asked. “You thought it was me and Hector pulling something over on you, right?”

“You’ve known him longer.”

“Which means what? Means he’s had time to think about how to replace me. I’m a good fucking trainer, Rick. My life is complicated, and maintaining it isn’t cheap. I was half-convinced he was trying to set you up to replace me.”

“Jesus fucking Christ. He’s setting everyone against everyone? Manuel?”

“I dunno. He’s never said anything about it.”

“Yeah. Probably got a secret. Jerry?”

There was silence again. “Jerry, um… He’s dead. From the laundry machine attack.”

A tiredness came over Rick, but it felt remarkably like sadness. He pushed it away. “You know about the player who got caught, right?”

“Yeah, Z-something.”

“That was Ditto. He traced it to a bunch of hacks in the anti-cheat bot’s database, then he traced it back to Hector.”

More silence. “That son of a bitch. Yeah. That tracks. I knew he was running cheats, but honestly, he told me he was grooming you to use them. Said he could make a ton of money with undetectable cheats and sell inside info to other folks gambling on the matches.”

“He’s tried to get me into his crooked shit before. He tell you that?”

“Yeah, but…”

He sat forward in his seat. “But?”

“He thought you’d get accustomed to the money. Once you told me about the eggs, I figured he had that on you, too. Just a matter of time until you were using his cheats to win matches. I dunno. I never thought you needed them, but Hector is… He’s always gonna take a rigged bet over an honest chance.”

“So he sets up players with undetectable cheats, then sells the inside info to other gamblers? So why did he have to put a defective cheat on me?”

“If I had to guess, to discredit a competitor. You know anything about where the defective cheat comes from?”

Rick nodded. “Ditto said it looks like other cheats from someone named Proscus.”

There was a long intake of air through the mic. “I know that name. Hell, Hector’s based his whole approach on Proscus’ business model. Guess he wanted to bump the biggest player out of the game by making his cheats look bad. Just a guess, but it doesn’t make sense otherwise.”

He stared at the wall at the far end of the room, trying to put all the new information into the right places.

“What are you gonna do?” Alex asked.

“I’m gonna go talk to Hector.”