The UltraViolence Show Chapter One

Sequel to Soda Pop Soldier and PopKult Warlord

Today begins the Serialization of the Next Novel in the SodaPop Soldier Series.

The UltraViolence Show picks up where PerfectQuestion, a future ProGamer in an online battle arena MMO called WarWorld, left off in PopKult Warlord, the Sequel to SodaPopSoldier. Kicked out of ProGaming, PQ lost his leg after serving as a dropship pilot during the Martian Insurrection. Now, back on Earth, his story continues as he becomes involved in…

The UltraViolence Show

A SodaPop Soldier Novel

By

Nick Cole

You will find that I am different now.

Chapter One

Inbound on the objective and the phase line one soundtrack is halfway cooked as the drums chant and some old rock and rollah sings about the Devil being Inside. We are just some ice cream truck steadily moving toward the target. Not a vehicle full of heartbreakers and lifetakers. Please don’t anyone look too close before it’s time to get it on.

The streets of the city are clean, clear, and beautiful with some of the most exciting and high-priced retail outlets lining the block like soldiers in their best parade dress. This digital metropolis is definitely the place to be these days now that the war against ourselves is over.

But AnchorCoin’s cybercity is like that. This is the one of the tops of the mark. There are several. But this is one.

It’s high noon. The bank is running the heaviest crypto transactions from the foreign markets and incoming day trading. No one expects a daylight hit. No one expects lifetakers and heartbreakers. Just digital ice cream trucks you can hit in-world and have the treat at your micro-oasis within ten minutes, so you never have to leave life-digital.

Corporations are the best that way at keeping you chained up in one place. A pretty place. Shiny chains. But a place they want you to stay so they can keep track of you.

And a state-of-the-art micro-oasis is the next must-living-your-best-life space according to all the ever-hip influencers and relentless media.

If you believe them.

“Night raids are for noobs, eh PQ?” says Kodiak over the chat as I spot the first ring of AnchorCoin’s security ahead. AnchorCoin’s Intimidator high speed armored pursuit sedans are two blocks from the bank. I’ll worry about these on the way out. Right now, all we are is a cyber advert ice cream truck mocked up to seem like we’re sporting Bombsicle Retros. Just like the good old days’ folks. Analog Ice Cream from before the Before. Not a ground force team of four commandos wearing fast food mascot masks from last century. That’s my little jab even though the masks are actually Gunfighter CyberArmor from Martini and Berretta. IRL Spec Ops use these.

The Colonel.

The Clown.

The Taco Bandito.

And SimpleStevie in some bear mask from a chain I never heard of that once specialized in frosted root beers and waitresses in roller skates and short skirts.

The wheelman is just a bot who looks like a happy nobody as all the bots do in AnchorCoin’s little slice of Cybertropolis. The Motto here is… Better than Real Life used to be! The online world where all the CryptoBanks and high-end high street retail do business in fantastic worlds for virtual customers to shop and celebrate.

Celebrate what, I asked once.

I don’t know. It’s like Cook  once said to me back on Mars. “The Celebration of Nothing is occasion enough for the slaves.”

The world got weird real fast while we were all gone on that foreign solar war adventure.

Devil Inside is done, the rapid tempo tribal hypnotic thunder beating out its last as we move to Phase Line Two.

Go time. Or as my favorite old skool  sci-fi novel from the Before while I was recuperating on the hospital frigate waiting for my new cyber-interface leg liked to put it… Time to Get it On, Strange.

“Bank ahead,” I tell my team, and everyone runs through last weapon checks. Bolts slam shut on high-power six point five rounds chambered for kill. We’re all doing Defender Bullpups with Special Operations short barrels and extended mags.

“Blind sights engaged.” This is all according to the plan we’ve run a dozen times on a virtual sandtable. I get double clicks over the chat all around. The Bombsicle Ice Cream truck that isn’t one pulls to the curb and SimpleStevie makes one of the noises he makes because of his condition. After a dozen run-throughs, we’re all used to his little bird noises and sudden ululations or moans. Yeah. It’s what he does because of his condition, but he’s a good enough player that he’s running suppression as we go for Jackpot.

We all met in WarWorld. All four of us on the breaching team and some of the others on my two other teams running support and exfil. Free Players. Not a real live WarWorld pro among us. Mercenaries is what history calls us. Or Ronin. Masterless samurai. But that all makes it sound a little more noble cool than reality really is. Ain’t that the way it always plays out though. Most of us have been banned on some level from gaming somewhere all across the worlds. Some, like me, have been ban-hammered for life. I play when I can, under alias tags, until the ban hammer smells me out and slams down on my IP address. There’s even a small social media cult dedicated to reporting me whenever I show up. Because people are awful.

I have groupies.

But I can’t tell whether they wanna kiss me or kill me. So I keep to myself now in the six months since I got back from the Martian Insurrection as they call it now.

It was a war for survival when they needed us to go. Now, not so much. Even a vat grown leg isn’t the priority it once was when all the MetalPop stars sang that song for charity. VetAid.

What a joke. I don’t even go online with the VA anymore. It ruins my day.

The ice cream truck pulls up to the curb in front of the monumental AnchorCoin Cryptobank we are about to rob.

“Go,” I say over the chat and all elements are on Phase Line Loot as the soundtrack switches to Joan Jett’s, yeah I never heard of her either, Bad Reputation. Appropriate for my situation, because I’m seriously crossing the last line here… but the payout is totally worth it if we can pull off something no one has ever pulled off before.

Robbing a CryptoBank of its JackPot bounty.

It’s not like robbing a real bank. It’s not an actual crime. Technically. In fact, all the Cryptobanks having a standing Dare, it’s called, really a bounty, to see if anyone is dumb enough to rob their un-robably quantum-protected cyber vaults inside their slice of the hottest economic virtual world.

They dare you to do it because they want to see you fail, and they want everyone else to see you fail. That way everyone knows the difference between the haves and the have nots.

Between them and you.

They even point you toward the Jackpot and run point zero zero zero one three of their hourly transactions through the Jackpot account. When you’re doing the business they do every day in Crypto, it’s a phenomenal amount in untraceable free market crypt. If you can get it.

And if you do… well there goes your CitizenScore. That’s the part they don’t tell you. And you’ll never work again, or pro game. Even though my gaming attorney says I’ve still got an appeal or two left. As long as I keep paying him.

He works in New Dehli. And even for that place, he’s not in what one would call the nice part of town. I google viewed his street.

I’ve seen strip mall Boom shooting galleries that look better.

But… for a subsistence veteran of the Martian Insurrection, my cut of the take is enough to live in the Bahamas for the rest of my life and even get a new leg on the commercial market.

The high energy rapid beat song I’ve picked for this phase of the operation starts and we’re out of the explosives laden ice cream truck just in front of the marble steps leading up and into the bank.

Kodiak is second out. I’m first and I waste a guard on the right who always handles foot traffic. We’ve done our homework. Yeah, he’s only a happybot armed with a sidearm, but I paint him in the skull, landing the Defender Bullpup’s laser right where it needs to go. The Defender uses a synthetic hydrogel open bolt, so the recoil is minimal as I shift targets and do his wingman two seconds later.

Kodiak is out and he picks up the two on the left just as planned. All shots are heavily suppressed with hexagonal-shaped NightWatch silencers. Best in the business. I’ve been doing Black runs just to finance this operation. Gladiator arena in MurderPorn Horror world called Gothica. Not big bucks, but loosey goosey security enough that I could collect small payouts and get them switched over to the kind of funds that would get us weapons in Cybertropolis under the sensors.

JeeroyLenkins is third out and running the Defender to take point until we’ve cleared the approach to breaching the entrance which is already going wild with doomsday klaxons. SmartCams have tagged dead happybot guards. One of Kodiak’s bad guys is still electronically chanting, “Have a nice… day… citizen.” According to plan and happening in real time, he has no targets as we cover the phase line and get ready to surge on Jackpot. The four show guards as we all called the happybots on the street were all that were here. The defenses at the front door are heavy, but the marble steps are so steep they have no field of fire on street level. Defense design flaw as I saw and took advantage of in my planning.

Commando team to the front door was the pro move because it seems like suicide when basic recon shows they’ve got six auto-gun turrets inside the main glassed-in cathedral lobby, two EDs at the main doors, and two squads of state-of-the-art real time guards who are some of the almost best on WarWorld to react to an immediate attack. One QRF, Quick Reaction Force, staged behind the scenes to come running in thirty seconds.

Pros.

But not SuperDuperBowl pros like I once was. One of Pro Gaming’s best. A regular WarWorld celebrity.

But there’s a fine line between celebrity and infamy. And this is me crossing that line, and chucking the smoke into the pool of gas I doused the bridge with.

There is no going back. But at least I don’t have to pay Mr. Ravichandran-Madhavapeddi anymore to wage a losing war on my behalf. I am more cognizant of losing wars now than I once was. Of tin pot knights in tarnished armor going out to do battle when the odds are not in anyone’s favor that day.

That is unless you’re watching from the high table on the other side of the system with no skin in the game. Death on the sands of mars is a bad death. Trust me.

We’re moving in a tactical wedge up the marble steps of AnchorCoin Cryptobank at high noon as Joan Jett motor mouths her way through the song. A song the exact length we need to do this job, loot the JackPot Vault, and move to Phase Line Fade.

Ten steps from the top of the stairs I’m switching to the Judge. Pump Action recoilless rifle the size of a shotgun. Six rounds. Defender on a sling dangles across my chest plate carrier.

“Judge up,”

SimpleStevie passes me bringing the only primary not a Defender Bullpup to bear on the main entrance. Already the shining steel impressive security gates are coming down as the robotic doomsday klaxons warn cyber citizens to get clear immediately. “Possible gunfire and extreme violence may occur within the next thirty seconds and AnchorCoin is not responsible for the loss of virtual life or Non-Fungible Items currently being transported and traded on premises.”

“PQ… nets are picking this up. Hashtags populating. We’re getting traffic,” notes JerroyLenkins who’s keeping an eye on the social media.

 The two secret entrances are buried inside the block glass and steel massive wings of the futuresque impossible building that stacks higher and higher in ever expanding flat-topped roofs like some kind of inverted pyramid ahead of us. A temple of crypto. Up at the highest levels are rumored to be private vaults where nation states and mega-corp financiers are supposed to keep their darkest secrets and unreported billions.

But that’s true of all CrytpoBanks.

The first ED, a small almost bullet-shaped mech with two massive GAU19 minis already spooling, lumbers out of the first secret door within the armored glass block entrance.

“Firing!” I shout over the comm as I rack the first round into the Judge using its pump action. I’d seen these fired on Mars. You had to wear a special helmet to prevent the concussive effects that come with operation. Ain’t like the CyberCommando movies where he just runs and guns with these things and that hair remains perfectly disheveled on Storm Willis, the movie stars’ movie star of the moment.

But this is a game world. So… same same.

I pull the trigger and send a 20mm recoilless round straight into the first ED. ED stands for Extreme Defense. Their full ident is Extreme Defense Security Mech. But everyone tags ‘em “EDs.”

I guess because that’s easier to say.

The first twenty round out of the Judge is a military grade flechette round. Halfway to target the round splinters into about three hundred wafer-thin and sharp-as-hell surgical needles. Needles that are a foot long and made of sub-forged UltraCarbon. The stuff they build the light ships out of. These needles are dumb rounds though. Nothing smart about ‘em. They don’t lock onto any targets. They don’t negate armor. They’re not even smart linked. But what they do is turn into a hurtling cone of death moving at just under three thousand FPS.

Game physics here in Cybertropolis are on point. Shock wave distortion expands away from the round and my in-game POV rocks as I all but gut the ED before it can get its defensive screen up to deflect three hundred narrow focus foot-long starship grade needles hurtling straight at it.

I’d gone through the security protocols and watched some feeds of raids by robber clans and fun junkie guilds who’d tried to hit this particular Jackpot here before. What I saw told me two things. You had thirty seconds to knock out the first ED as it broadcast its lawyerly emergency stand clear broadcast once the guards inside had smashed the “We’re under attack right now” button. Which they had. And I could see them jocking up to go to the mat with us even now.

But that’s what SimpleStevie is for.

Meanwhile… three hundred deadly and nigh unbreakable flechettes formed a cone of fast-moving death and sliced straight through the security mech’s armor and savaged onboard internal systems in the blink of an eye. The ED ran its heavy processors deep inside its squat belly. Now those were swiss-cheesed by the Judge’s 20mm anti-mech round. That’s why I’d dialed the cone on the round to narrow focus blast wave.

The ad for these things on the Black has this old space merc holding up what looks to be for all purposes the Judge recoilless shotgun and saying, “I keep this handy… for close encounters.”

The ED just went dead right there as the second ED came out half a second later. It’s literally Get It On-Thirty as Sergeant Orion and the Strange would say. The anti-personnel security mech’s danger protocols are already upgraded because ED number one is no longer in runtime and broadcasting on the links. Therefore, threat assessment was no doubt telling ED number two to go straight into KILL MODE. Or whatever they called it deep inside the high tech and overpriced security AnchorCoin execs hired.

I was on both boots, hunched just below the steps, and pumping the next round into the Judge. Kodiak is engaging the first Intimidator on scene. Riddling its armored hood with armor-piercing six point five. Screaming, “THE ACTION IS THE JUICE, MAN! THE ACTION IS THE JUICE!”

The ED’s defensive screens, if you read the spec docs on ProtoDefense websites, and had a little hack deep in for a behind the scenes look, let you know that the first thing the ED did in its security watch defensive protocols was to go to full shields to deflect actual kinetic violence off of it as it activated its broad sweep targeting laser and assessed all threats, breaking them into primary and secondary targets based on mission and present danger.

Me holding a Judge, put me very high in its threat matrix analysis. Too bad the next round of the six I had in the cutdown recoilless rifle man portable heavy weapon called the Judge, was ready to go.

Next round is an all but useless tactical low altitude EMP star cluster. For most actual CQB situations. But it’s why all of us are wearing Gunfighter Tac Masks mocked up as fast food mascot masks. The cartoon eyes are shielded against what is about to be a small slice  of the sun’s total candle output. It will do nothing physical to the mech. And if I hadn’t shut down ED number one, both of them would have been able to corroborate last known positions of kinetic unfriendliness and start dishing out high dose forty-millimeter ball ammunition in adult-sized doses, shutting down my little bank robbery in about ten seconds. Or less.

The lens inside our masks takes over as I fire the round, sealing the iris and providing us a glowing 3-D render in green of the battlefield we are currently fighting for. It’s very last gen warfare but it’s perfect if you’re gonna use an APEM low burst round set to dish out one billion lumens of light in a sudden EMP flash. Even the EMP effect won’t harm the faraday hardened security mech. That’s standard. The sudden burst of high intensity sunlight for half a second is going to be another thing though.

The round streaks away, calculating distance to target and freaking out because this thing is coded to go several thousand meters of travel before reaching its detonation point. Normally. Not forty meters. But it accepts the targeting info and dets anyway like a good piece of military hardware.

Targeting cameras on the mech are blind and will be blind forever. The flash was sudden and brilliant, and if you weren’t wearing a mask, your retinas and cameras are now perma-scarred. Even peeps watching on the internet are gonna blow out their monitors for a good minute. Bad monitors are going to permanently fry.

But who cares, my CitizenCredit score is already fried.

“We got sixty thousand viewers and climbing, boys,” shouts JeeroyLenkins. “We goin’ viral!” SimpleStevie whoops innocently. Kodiak is still hosing the Intimidator and happybot guards inside.

They used these APEM rounds down in the muzzie wars in Indonesia. Kiwi told me all about them. Once. In another life not this one anymore. We don’t talk much.

Both mechs are now done and the security doors are fully closed and gleamingly shut against us now. ‘Cause that’s the plan. Reinforced bank vault doors, seriously bulletproof glass blocks, and explosive-proof glass cathedral windows rocket up and away above us as the levels expand over our heads. There are very few weapons that a grunt, or a common cybercriminal such as myself, can carry that will meaningfully get us through this.

But round number three doesn’t exist. Not legally. Not officially. Not even in any of the armaments sites that catalog everything mankind can come up with to kill the rest of mankind. I just knew about it from the Special Ops guys back on Mars. Flew those studs in and out of some serious hot spots. And they always carried PyroRep rounds with them even though replicating napalm was considered a war crime to even manufacture. But hey… it was war. Or at least it was then. And how else were they going to get into some of those serious Insurrectionist Martian bunkers the UN sent us there to destroy in the name of freedom. Or something.

But that’s another story.

There’s no aim, skill, or finesse to this round that cost me the most of all the equipment I cobbled together for this hit on the Jackpot. Had to go into the Black Markets just to find a coder who could get it past the Cybertropolis security servers.

I pump the Judge and feed another round in the chamber. The PyroRep round now. Replicating super napalm as one operator called it.

Don’t blow this, PQ, I tell myself and paint the high dollar security bank vault door that will give us access to the main lobby, the six autoguns, and the stacked security troops all waiting to murder us, imminently speaking.

Round out and away and I’m already switching back to the Defender.

The PyroRep hits the gleaming steel door and explodes, sending living volcanic plasma all over the thick steel face. Ten seconds it’ll melt through and because it’s bio-organic it’ll continue to eat a twenty-by-twenty-foot hole into the facility we are here to plunder.

The Speical Ops dudes didn’t play around.

“You’re up, Stevie!” I say over the chat as we advance forward in our combat wedge.

“Got a signal,” says our hacker. “Going in… dropping the bomb… hacking….”

“Get ‘er done, Jeeryoy, because we goin’ in in ten seconds,” threatens Kodiak.

That’s the plan. The hacker had a ten second  window to get into the six autogun torrent network that guards the gleaming lobby and shut it down immediately.

At the same moment, SimpleStevie as the fast food Colonel, stumbled forward dragging the RangerCombatSystems medium assault smartgun. Its onboard computer and sensors have already tagged everyone in a six-block radius. If its operator wanted to… he could unload smart rounds that would kill as many of those people as it could. That is, if you had high dollar smart rounds by the unlimited belt load to get it done.

We could afford just the one belt. That’s all we need. Even though we have backup belts of good old High Power Anti Armor dumb rounds in 7.62 for just-in-case.

SimpleSteivie, chortling like a small boy with some kind of weird and fractured joy, unloads half a belt through the molten hot plasma-expanding breach point. The rounds race through, ignite their onboard control systems, and ruin the stacked defenders who were all ready to go toe to toe on us .

Even his character walks like he does IRL. In real life. He has cerebral palsy. I watched videos of him on his wall. His family. He’s just got a mom. There’s one video where she tells this story about in a widows’ group recording he’s posted. Stevie’s dad died on Mars in the early days before my time. It was from some kind of grief support group. The widows were being asked if they had a hero.  Someone from history, or the Bible, or movies, or anything… someone. Someone they could look toward so the grief of the loss of their loved one didn’t consume them. A hero.

In the video on Steve’s wall his mom recounts that story. And then she looks at the smartphone camera someone was recording it with and says, “My son. Stevie. He’s my hero.”

And right now, SimpleStevie is laughing like he’s having the best time ever as he guns down the best guards the cyberworlds can field. Yeah, he never would have made it on any of the pro teams for WarWorld. His skills aren’t that good. And he’s disabled and that’s gonna get in the way when bets the size of small nation states are on the line in pro gaming along with all that real world corporate sponsorship.

But I wanted him on my team for this one.

I met him in WarWorld when I was just messing around on the amateur servers. We were fighting on the Bacalau map. A big hot Battle Royale map. Big prizes. All the best non-pros playing, and cheating. We ended up in a small squad and after the drop on the zombie overrun island, surrounded and getting shot at by a hundred other teams all doing their best to kill everyone else. He and I made it through the first ten minutes, him chortling with joy as we ran, scavenged guns and ammos, and killed our way through the first ring. Two hours later we made it to the fortress. One of the last twenty teams standing.

We were loaded for bear. We had lots of guns and scavenged ammo and we worked well together. I remember thinking at one point, when he got downed, that I’d just go on without him and get the solo awards that were still possible.

But just before a shootout at the desert gas station, he’d told me, “d-d- don’t be afraid when I scream… w-w-w- when I’m shooting.”

You have to listen hard to hear what he’s saying because of his disability. “I-I-I’m not scared. This… is… fun. Th-th-this… it’s… how I s-s-s-show it. I hope that’s okay, Perfect…Question.”

He also has a slight stutter.

I told him it was okay as we got ready to move on the next objective to enter the fortress. I was just playing. Truth was I was having fun. He… he was having the best day of his life. People online aren’t always cool. It can get rough.

“S-S-s-sometimes… it’s not… oh-oh-okay,” he went on. Explaining. “I… make… people… uncomfortable. I-I-I… know that. This-this… makes me happy. And… it’s it is… how I show it.”

So there I was crying. I do that a lot since I came back from Mars. But it’s getting better. I was just playing a game to get my mind off how hopeless my situation is starting to look. He was having fun. A lot of fun.

“It’s all good,” I told him. “Now let’s finish this thing.”

We got close that day. But in the end, we both got killed and had fun doing it.

He told me as the match ended and the winners got the credits, “That was the… m-m-most fun I ever… had. Th-th-tha-ank you.”

So when I decided WarWorld was never going to let me go pro again, and that with one hack-robbery on a Jackpot, I could make a bunch of life changing money and work for the other side somewhere down in the Bahamas… there are rules in pro gaming… and what I’m doing now is against one of them… I decided I’d cut Stevie in for some of that JackPot.

That life changing money will help him. And his mom. For whoever that grunt was that was his dad back on Mars. I saw a lot of them, dead and wounded down on the deck. And I tried to get as many as I could out when I was flying CasEvac at Mons Olympus.

But that’s another story.

My son. He’s my hero.

We enter the main lobby of AnchorCoin with the objective in sight. JeeroyLenkins’ hack bomb goes off and we have two minutes to reach and crack the vault now. Stevie is hosing the Quick Reaction Force that has come to support and close the breach. Using up the last of the smart rounds.

“Ch-ch-changing belt” he croons in his fractured boy’s voice. He’s having fun. And we’re closer to hacking a Jackpot than anyone has ever gotten.

This could be big.

Let the dice fly. But I already did that.

Author’s Note: Thank you to everyone who encouraged me to get on with PQ’s story. SodaPop Soldier was a big success for Harper Collins when I initially published it for them, earning a Publisher’s Weekly Starred Review. The book was owned by them, and since they fired me I couldn’t work in this ‘verse anymore. Recently I reaquired the rights and now I’m ready to start telling what happens to PerfectQustion next. This first chapter is free. Paid Subscribers (The Hand) will get the rest of the book for free as I drop chapters each month. I encourage you to sub now here. It’s just $5 a month. And I’ll tuckerize you (put your name, gamer tag, or callsign in one of my works.) Plus you get inside content and my manuscripts once they are finished. If you haven’t read the first books in the series you can get them below. I hope you check them out and Thank you. -Nick

Book 1

SodaPop Soldier

Book 2

PopKult Warlord