Your Coin or Your Life
958 Words
The change was immediate when I stepped past the tree line.
The meadow birdsong cut off like someone had thrown a switch. The temperature dropped several degrees. The light shifted to something greener and more diffuse, filtered down through a canopy that my own art team had spent three weeks getting right, and now I was standing underneath it with my heart rate doing something my END stat of ten was not equipped to manage gracefully.
Every footstep sounded too loud on the packed dirt. Every shadow in my peripheral vision convinced my nervous system to fire before my brain could countermand it. I kept reminding myself that I was still inside the safe buffer zone, still two hundred yards from the chokepoint, still technically in the part of the forest I had designated as non-threatening.
The irrational part of my nervous system did not have read access to my design documents.
"You are fine," I said, quietly, watching the path ahead. "You are in the safe zone. Nothing spawns here. You programmed this. You know exactly what is in these trees and it is nothing."
A branch cracked somewhere to my left.
"That is a squirrel," I said immediately. "That is one hundred percent a squirrel."
I kept moving. The path curved between two large oaks, and the light dropped another shade. I could see the boulders ahead now, the natural chokepoint where the path narrowed, exactly where I had placed it on the encounter map eighteen months ago while eating cold takeout at my desk. I had chosen this spot because the terrain forced engagement. No room to run left or right, steep embankment on one side, dense undergrowth on the other.
I had been very pleased with the geography.
"Left flanker first," I murmured, running the sequence one more time. "Lower HP, faster to drop. Then pivot right. Then the leader. Do not let them surround you, do not back up toward the embankment, and do not freeze."
The last one was going to be the hardest.
I made it to within fifty yards of the boulders before I stopped walking and just stood there for a moment, which was not part of the plan but happened anyway. Seven lives. If I died here, in the first real encounter of the game, in Bandit Encounter Alpha which I had labeled as introductory difficulty in the design documents, then I had six. And the memory fragmentation would take something, some piece of the life I had outside this world, and I would not know what was gone until I reached for it and found empty space.
"You are not going to die here," I said, and started walking again before I could talk myself out of it. "You are not going to die in the tutorial encounter you designed yourself. That would be genuinely embarrassing and I refuse."
The ambush came exactly where I had programmed it.
The first bandit dropped from a branch directly overhead and landed on the path in front of me with a heavy thud that I felt through the soles of my boots. He was exactly as I had designed him: leather armor patched in three places, a scar bisecting his left eyebrow, a rusty short sword held with the loose confidence of someone who had used it often enough to stop thinking about it.
I recognized him from the character sheet I had filled out. Bandit Leader, designation BL-01. HP 45. Attack speed slow. Weak to overhead strikes.
Then he opened his mouth and I heard my own voice.
Not my speaking voice, not exactly, but my voice filtered through the character and the script I had written at one in the morning on a Wednesday when I had been running on energy drinks and the particular creative recklessness of severe sleep deprivation.
"Well, well," he said, with the cadence I had recorded in the coat-closet booth. "What do we have here? Another lamb wandering away from the flock?"
It was a deeply strange experience, being threatened in your own voice. I had thought I was being evocative when I wrote that line. I had read it aloud to myself several times to check the rhythm of it. Now it was being delivered to me by an entity that wanted to take my things and end my life, and the rhythm felt considerably less clever than it had at one in the morning.
The two flankers emerged from behind the boulders on cue. Perfect pincer formation. I had drawn that formation on a whiteboard with an actual marker and explained to my AI programmer why it was more psychologically effective than a direct frontal approach. My AI programmer had nodded and implemented it exactly as requested.
I made a mental note to apologize to my AI programmer if I ever got out of here.
"Your coin or your life, stranger," the leader said. "Choose quickly."
I knew these NPCs. I had written their behavior trees. They were not programmed for mercy and they were not programmed for reasonable negotiation. They were programmed to kill the player, take their items, and return to patrol pattern. There was no dialogue branch that ended well for me.
So instead of talking, I raised my practice sword, found the grip I had spent an hour learning, and tried to hold onto every form Petra the fencing instructor had given me.
The leader laughed, a sound I had recorded from my college roommate doing his best villain impression in the coat closet after too much beer. My roommate had thought it was hilarious. I had thought it added authentic menace.
"Have it your way, fool," he said.
Then all three of them attacked at once.
- Writer
