Auger & Augment: Blood of The Boundless, #1

By Wilson A. Bateman

Things have gotten heavy in Nathan's life, so when the powers-that-be decide citizens will be able to live in a virtual reality fantasy world, it seems like the perfect answer. No more teachers, no more books, no more parents' dirty looks. The perfect solution for an angsty teen! All it will cost is everything he has.

On arrival, Nathan finds himself alone and a world away from anything he's ever known, and the video game is only too happy to have him there. Follow Nathan's coming of age in an epic fantasy world of gods, war, and magic, where death comes swiftly and never offers release. Can he overcome his demons and forge a life for himself?

Content Warning: Violence, Language, and just a touch of The Gay.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilson A. Bateman
• Release date: Feb 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386281702

Wilson A. Bateman

Wilson A. Bateman lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with his husband and their three kids. He is an avid reader and gamer, as well as an armchair philosopher and skeptic.

Book preview

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

AUGER & AUGMENT

First edition. February 25, 2018.

Copyright © 2018 Wilson A. Bateman.

Written by Wilson A. Bateman.

This book is dedicated to my father, who traveled the world in search of adventure.

Auger & Augment

Blood of The Boundless: Book 1

www.WilsonABateman.com

Cover art by Marta Schluneger, @martaaileen.

© 2018 Wilson A. Bateman. All rights reserved.

This book is dedicated to my father, who traveled the world in search of adventure.

Prologue

When the Grey came, it came all at once, rolling soundlessly over the wooden bulwarks and stilling the night air. The songs of nocturnal insects ended as though snatched from the air, rubbing legs falling still and silent as life fled in pursuit of color. The human occupants of the wall began to fill the silence with shouts of horrible recognition and warning as cloth and leather turned to ash and fell away.

The Grey reached the first houses even as the guards’ shouts did, and the cries of horror spread like fire through the town. Fire that followed ash. Voices rose in the familiar sounds of martial incitement: calls to arms, calls to rally, and were then outpaced by wails of loss as parents rushed to secure and comfort children through doors that were opened only to fall away to dust—onto cribs filled with the forms of new life. Life that had fled and been replaced by Grey.

It was common knowledge that he had taken the tree, and that only a blackened stump remained after he had eaten his fill. Common knowledge that was confirmed as a sudden gale raked the greyed fortifications. Matter that no longer had reason to exist dissolved on contact, motes of ash floating momentarily in the gale before simply winking out of existence. Clothing and armor followed suit, as the guards rocked back on their heels at the sudden pressure, those pieces not yet greyed falling as straps and buckles gave way. There was no help for it though, and the men and women of the guard knew well enough the stakes. This was not a time for modesty, as the only chance of survival the night held was finding the source of the Grey and ending it.

They also knew theirs was not the first town to be consumed. The elves had had the best chance at resisting the Grey, but Halmilibranth was now only a miles-wide ring of ash surrounding a twisted trunk of char. The mightiest civilization in The Boundless, built around the tree and in many ways by the tree, fallen to ruin in a matter of days. Halmilibranth, which had stood unassailable since the beginning.

And so they gathered together and raced against the Grey, both against its coming and against the hope that weapons would remain intact.

The first of these disappeared into a black that had gone beyond night, and stumbled back out to fall upon friends and family, the weapons they had hoped could resist the Grey put to use in savagery against those they had sought to protect.

Light began to fall among these soldiers as the town’s seedborn reached the fray, pushing away madness and darkness both. Armor and arms were strengthened and eyes cleared, and hope filled voices that knew better but needed, regardless, to hope.

Then, with a howl, air and voice left the magi, only to be followed by a broad cataclysm of earth and fire that engulfed the group: tearing, burning, consuming. Clergymen who had gathered cried out to gods that had long since abandoned the races. Gods no one had seen since She of Plenty had met her end at his hand.

Morning broke bright and clear and still, as though to make up for the horrors of the night. Where battle normally left its mark of pain and stink and soot, this night had left only emptiness, a lonely crater surrounded by clear-cut forests and fields. Remnants of a settlement that had been scoured away by the will of a single man.

He’s not a man, those that escaped would whisper. He’s not a man, and he can’t be stopped!

Luctus is coming!

Chapter 1

I got out of the house early the next morning, out under the wide sky with the frost and the sagebrush. Dad was already gone, but I just needed to be away from them. All of them. The clamor of my brothers and sisters squabbling over breakfast only added to the internal chaos, and if I could be alone, I could be calm.

My breath gusted in front of me as I made my way to the bus stop, the long walk passing quickly as I stewed. My brain felt full. And empty. There was a logjam somewhere, and the vacuum between my ears echoed the void in my chest. My eyes burned from more than just the cold, dry air. So much for calm.

I’d come to dread the tack of his shoes upstairs, come to dread the tone that was simply the way he said my name now. The knot in my gut only pulled tighter. Nathan! The pressure would increase, and the desire to run would metastasize. Too big to face. Running was the problem though, wasn’t it? Grades were slipping, chores left undone. The problem was clear, but no matter how I oriented myself, I inevitably ended up at tasks avoided. Easier to lock myself away in someone else’s reality than to look up and face my own.

Running has a price though, and it was getting harder and harder to look up.

I reached the bus stop, that lonely crossroad deemed close enough to the smattering of houses to suffice. No one else was even on their way yet. Good.

Parking myself on the split-rail fence, I rifled through my backpack. I’d have to stop by the library once I made it to school. This novel was almost finished: gotta have my morphine. I buried myself, something to think about beside the pressure inside. Drip, drip.

Kids began to filter in, billowing in their own right. I offered half-hearted greetings in response to theirs, before cursorily returning to my book. No one bothered pushing further. They had their friends and knew I wouldn’t be good company regardless. What would we even talk about?

The bus came, and I filed on behind the crowd, plopping down on the frigid plastic and working to project a chill of my own, tucking my knees against the seat back and slouching down to nestle alone in my big coat. Safe and sound. Ender would have been proud.

The book was standard fantasy, of course. A young person on a quest to discover or destroy—what was it this time? A ring? A sword? A dragon? Regardless, I buried myself, eager to disengage the gears grinding in my brain. These problems were easy. There was a goal, there was an enemy. They certainly wouldn’t be left, purposeless, to wonder at the point of it all. The hero would struggle, but it would all work out in the end. They’d come out stronger.

The bus rumbled on, having eaten its fill of hormone-ridden teens.

Oh shit! The government’s buying ADACorp!

I looked up, interest piqued. Policy was to ignore everyone—especially the other boys—but news of ADACorp warranted attention, if not actual involvement.

What? Why?

It’s got to be for The Jack. Everyone’s going apeshit about it online!

"So, what do you care? Not like you’re ever gonna get into The Boundless!"

Not like I was ever going to get in either, but still. Getting to play The Boundless was my dream. I’d played MMOs (massively multiplayer online games)—was currently playing an MMO—and I’d even gotten to try a virtual reality title at an acquaintance’s house, using his bulky VR helmet to fight a few enemies with others online, Dungeons and Dragons-style. Still, The Boundless… just hearing the name got my heart pounding as my mind flooded with possibilities.

My video feed at home was full of recently watched promotional videos, as well as more than a few faked videos of gameplay. The fact that ADACorp claimed there was no way to record in-game hadn’t stopped me from searching.

"It’ll come down in price, you’ll see. At least it would have. Now who knows what’s going to happen?"

I knew what I wanted to happen: I wanted to play that game! After all, if books were morphine, games were heroin.

I had followed the progress as every major tech company had worked to make theirs the first, the best—the one that justified the cost. And then it just worked for ADACorp, and to those that had the money, any cost was justified. After all, The Jack didn’t creep onto the scene with incremental upgrades, moving from lo-res to hi, or from laggy to stable. The first users to have it installed immediately reported that there was no discernible difference between the VR experience and reality. I assumed the primate test subjects would agree.

Those reports were followed by a flood of early adopters from the upper crust. Tech entrepreneurs mostly. The first offerings were in the seven-digits, though every month had brought refinements to the manufacturing process and the installation surgeries, as well as new technologies to care for users’ bodies while they were out. Still, the costs were so far beyond what a regular seventeen year-old could muster, there was nothing to be done but lust. As if I weren’t doing enough of that already.

The rest of the day was a blur: Bio, Calc, Psych… I gleaned what I could from the scattered conversations around me, wishing for the umpteenth time that my parents had gotten me a phone instead of another sibling. It wasn’t until Computer Science that I managed to start putting the rumors to rest with my own research. Mr. Gerber wasn’t even pretending to teach, simply waving to us from behind his monitor as we filtered into the room, and barking out Free day today! I wasn’t the only one racing to bury myself in parsing the news.

***

They set the age limit at 16, and the country started tearing itself apart. Of course the law-and-order crowd was for it. Right-wing talking heads had spent months salivating over the opportunity to reduce crime and clean up the inner cities. The Left had caught the bug too. Finally they had their chance to plunk the government's teat into every mouth. Libertarians and the Religious Right were melting down and stockpiling weapons, convinced it was the end of the world or a government power grab, or both. My own church exhorted its followers not to worship idols, referring to The Boundless obliquely through press releases. It wasn’t enough.

The idea had been born too quickly and had moved through Congress faster than anyone could have expected, backed by billions from Silicon Valley and an unheard of coalition of left and right-leaning think tanks. It was just too attractive to too many people.

People could choose to live in The Boundless, indefinitely.

And then came the protests, the counter-protests, the bombings.

Every single American citizen would be welcome, to give up their possessions and make the move to a virtual world. The intelligentsia were certain that the movers and shakers wouldn’t choose to be sidetracked by something as childish as a video game. Add to that the cost of admission—consigning every asset you owned over to the government—and it was the perfect system. Malcontents would remove themselves from the streets. People with no future and no desire for a future could go live in a fantasy world. Prisons would become a thing of the past.

And, with all that, would come the secondary benefits. No more poverty. No more food scarcity. No more crimes of desperation. No more young people roaming the streets getting into trouble. No glut of unplanned and unwanted children. And a million more reasons, many of them tenuous, but once the pundits were sold on the idea they ran with whatever reasons they could find. Only people who were serious about life need stay and participate. It was the perfect cure for the creeping lack of unskilled jobs automation had engendered.

I made my own decision in early November, only two weeks after the announcement, and two months in advance of the beta. I held onto it like a lifeline through the holidays, through the sermons decrying temptation and the sin of rejecting God’s creation. What was one more sin though? I was already an abomination.

It wasn't hard to rifle through my parents’ paperwork to find what I needed. Birth Certificate, Social Security Number. They didn't even realize they'd left the keys to my freedom lying around the house. The hard part came when it was time to send the paperwork. My finger hovered over the Submit button as I grappled with what my decision might do to my mom. In the end, however, memories of my dad’s angry face—memories of the fights, and the fear, and the disappointment—won out. I only planned on staying for a year, regardless. My mom would barely miss me, and since I had no assets, I had literally nothing to lose.

I prepared to enter the game. I prepared to run.

Chapter 2

Look at red dot. Complete. Look at red dot. Complete. Look at red dot. Complete…

Bend right arm. Extend right arm. Bend right arm. Extend right arm. Bend right arm. Extend right arm. Bend right arm. Complete. Bend left arm…

Grip post. Complete. Grip handle. Complete. Grip pommel. Complete...

Place stone in bag. Place stone in bag. Place stone in bag. Complete. Take stone from bag. Take stone from bag...

Say, Good Morning. How are you today? Complete. Say I am fine, thank you. How are you? Complete. Say...

Focus on image of fire. Focus on image of fire. Focus on image of fire. Focus on image of fire. Focus on image of fire. Complete. Focus on image of water…

Cast Flame Jet. Cast Flame Jet. Cast Flame Jet. Something about that... something was...

And then, with a rush, I was there, rising to meet the dream as though breaking the surface of a pool. One moment I was somewhere... outside. And the next? Excitement thrummed in my chest. I had come awake inside… inside whatever this was. Impenetrable darkness surrounded me.

Looking side to side, I was immediately staggered by a wave of vertigo that sent me crashing to the ground, falling onto nothing.

Cast Flame Jet.

The white letters hung patiently in front of me, now oriented perpendicular to the ground. I moved to get up, but my stomach lurched in protest, so I rolled onto my back and took a few deep breaths.

Cast Flame Jet.

The letters now loomed over me, insistent. I blinked. The letters flickered. I closed my eyes and slowly lifted my head. No vertigo, no nausea.

Cautiously regaining my feet, I opened my eyes again, making sure to hold very still.

Cast Flame Jet.

Moving my head by degrees, I could see that the text was following my gaze. The problem dawned on me; with only the text as a guide, I had no reference point for keeping my balance. And I do mean no reference point. Stretching out to either side of me was… nothing.

Stretching probably wasn’t the right word anyway, since I couldn’t sense anything about the space I was in. My voice didn’t echo. I didn’t get a sense of close walls or a vast space. There was just… nothing. I raised my hand. It was lit as though I was standing in full sun, but there was something strange about it that I couldn’t quite place. Still, with my hand up, I felt more stable, and as I slowly, slowly, looked down at the rest of myself, my brain worked to acclimatize.

I was standing on nothing as well, though the floor felt solid. Carefully tapping my right foot on the ground produced no sound, but did alleviate my concerns about its solidity. I bent down to look, but was still unable to see a thing. It was as if the floor didn’t exist. I brought my eye close. Nothing. I moved my hand close, thinking that the light from my body might illuminate the surface. Might reflect. Might cast a shadow. Nothing.

Wait.

Shadows! That was what was wrong with my hand—it had no shadows! I looked the rest of myself over. No shadows. It was almost like… like I was being rendered. 3D objects don’t just naturally have light on them, don’t naturally have shadows. The computers displaying them have to add light, and they can either do it by calculating how a programmed light source should interact with the object, or they can just have the object display with its own light that doesn’t interact with anything else around it. I didn’t have shadows because I was being rendered. And the text! Memory struck me all at once.

This was it: the day of my grand escape!

After getting off the bus at school, I had loitered in front of the building until everyone was inside, and had then made my way downtown to hitch a very different ride. ADACorp had arranged for vans to pick us up, security being a real concern. We were it, after all: the founding citizens of this new world. What had previously been a proof of concept had been fleshed out into an entire reality, ready to accept the outcasts of this one.

We were the first of those outcasts, twenty thousand of us from across the country, all being shuttled to a secret location in Utah. That proximity had been the deciding factor for me. I hadn’t been entirely sure upon receiving the email, but news that Utah, with its already extant glut of data centers, had been chosen as the location for a beta, convinced me. If I’d had to spring for air travel I never would have managed it—especially considering the requirement of a pre-screening exam to ensure none of us would keel over.

The facility itself had been nothing more than an enormous, non-descript warehouse in an industrial park. Security through anonymity. As we filed off the van, several passengers in my group brought our attention to a similar process happening across the lot, from a white van labelled Corrections. The orange jumpsuits had been hard to miss, but we’d all seen the news.

There had been an extensive orientation, with some folks needing information on exactly how a VRMMORPG worked—and even an explanation of the acronym: Virtual Reality Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. For a moment I wondered how such individuals had even made it into the beta, but tuned that all out to dive through the information on building a character. As any character I made would, for all intents and purposes, be me, I had wanted to make sure I took my time.

Then would have come the surgery (though, of course, I didn’t remember it), and the installation of The Jack, the vehicle through which a delicate mesh of gold filament would be implanted, enabling a neural link.

That’s what had brought me here, and that must be why my grip on the dream felt so stable. Normally a lucid dream will slip away after a few seconds, and you’ll wake up or fall back asleep within the dream. But this wasn’t quite a normal dream. I didn’t feel I could lose it at any second. Now that I was here, it felt solid.

It was clear what was happening as well. They were calibrating the neural interface for The Boundless, so input from my brain could be processed by the company’s computers, and vice versa.

Cast Flame Jet.

The text prompted. They were calibrating for spellcasting, I realized, and the thrill of that must have jarred me awake!

Ecstatic, I lowered myself into a sitting position. How many times had I tried this in the past? My mom finding the books on Wicca and Druidism I’d checked out from the library had stopped me from bringing them home, but hadn’t stopped me from searching for whatever magic the world had to offer. She might have thought I was toying with satanic forces, but I’d quickly learned that I was the one being toyed with. Anyone could write a book, after all, and someone sounding knowledgeable and sincere had no bearing on whether what they’d written actually worked. On top of that, my attempts had coincided with History and Psychology classes that underscored the fact that, when people are willing to play fast and loose with evidence, they could convince themselves of just about anything.

This was something altogether different though. This hocus pocus was real! Well, virtually real.

Willing myself calm, I focused. I had read so many different ways of casting spells, I didn’t know how to start. Did I need a spellbook? I didn’t have one. Did I need to draw something? No, that would be too complex for a calibration. I held my hand out in front of me. Flame Jet, I said. Nothing. Standing up, I once again shoved my hand forward. Flame Jet! I shouted, and instinctively looked behind me, feeling sheepish even though I was alone. Still nothing.

It can’t be this hard, I thought. They’re just calibrating right now!

I sorted back through the calibrations that had immediately preceded this one, before I’d come awake. I had to assume they’d be running the calibrations in order, building on successive mappings, and that had to be the key. They’d had me looking at pictures of fire. Looking at rendered fire. They must be wanting to correlate my brain’s neural pathways relating to the concept of fire with…

I held out my hand again and concentrated on fire. Tongues of flame licking and snapping in a fire pit. A tiny flame growing as it slid up a piece of paper. A candle flame dancing. A forest fire raging and roaring. Holding these images in my mind, I raised my hand again. Flame Jet!

The surge of adrenaline that hit me paled in comparison to the surprise as a burst of flame sprouted from my hand and disappeared into the dark. And then the exhilaration! I stared at my palm in wonder. I’d felt the heat on my palm and across my face! How could it have… My mind traced back through the previous calibrations I had undergone unknowingly. Heat calibration. Complete. I’d stood there, in that void, feeling heat move across every part of my body. They had mapped my neural response to it. And to cold. And to pressure. And to pain. They could make me feel whatever they wanted.

And now the text read "Complete." I had cast a spell!

I’d had similar experiences before—semi-lucid dreams in which I hadn’t quite realized I was dreaming, and which had made me thrill with excitement and anticipation, only to be disappointed when I awoke. The knowledge that this would last on waking sent my excitement climbing out of control in a way I hadn’t experienced since I was a kid.

Wonder. That’s what I was feeling. Pure, unadulterated, wonder. I had forgotten the emotion even existed, except as an abstract concept.

I wasn’t left long to sit with the experience though, and surprise quickly replaced wonder as a creature popped into existence directly in front of me. It was small and humanoid, with purple skin, and it was lit without shadows in the same way I was. Wary for a moment, I realized that the creature was simply standing with a rest animation, seemingly unaware of my presence. Imp? Brownie? Homunculus? Whatever it was, I welcomed the creature into the void. At the very least, having it as a reference point further eased my stomach.

Cast Bind.

The text commanded.

Eager to try a new spell, I considered what I knew. I’d just used a Fire spell, so there were likely to be spells based on the other standard fantasy elements. A bind spell could be Air, or maybe something physical… No, the text clearly said "Cast. That meant it was likely to be an Earth spell. It sounded a lot like the D&D Root-type spell. Visualizing roots digging into the earth, I held my hand out, expecting that same surge of energy as I said, Bind! Nothing happened. It took me three tries visualizing roots to get the spell to work. It was only when I thought back to previous calibrations, that I realized the game designers must have wanted me to incorporate more thoughts about dirt, of all things. I felt another surge of power and excitement as mounds of dirt materialized out of the dark and swiftly grew to harden around the imp-thing’s little legs, hardening with an audible stony rumble. The word Complete." appeared in front of me again, and the dirt faded from view.

Cast Heal.

I brushed my hands off in anticipation, immediately thinking back to previous calibrations. Grisly images of breached skin, gushing blood, and then 3D renderings of red blood cells flowing and platelets gathering to close CGI wounds. I held my hand out. Heal.

This one took me two tries; I hadn’t focused strongly enough on the imp. I was getting the hang of it though. Complete.

Cast Haste.

The imp disappeared. This spell I knew I would have to cast on myself, and I then realized that the calibrations were moving me through every casting type. Spells with no target. Targeted attacks. Targeted buffs. Spells targeting myself. They needed to map the pathways.

It was then that the thought first struck me. Could I game this? Could I manipulate the calibration to accept input that was only similar to what it was looking for? Every brain is different after all, and if I could convince the software that was mapping my responses…

I held my hand up, focused on images of clocks speeding up, people running more quickly, time-lapse videos of plants sprouting. You know—fast things. And then I thought, Haste, instead of voicing it. Nope.

I thought through the neural pathways that had to be involved. Ten tries. Fifteen. I considered giving up and just saying the word out loud, but figured I only had one chance with the calibration.

I had lost track of my attempts by the time I hit upon the right bundle of thoughts. I had to hold the word in my mind, with all the haste imagery, and at the moment of casting, the word had to be on the tip of my tongue. I had to literally feel the word in my mouth.

Haste, I thought.

My hand blurred momentarily as I dropped it, but