Laser-Tagged

The corridors were streaked with neon beams of light. They zigged.

They zagged.

They corkskrewed and wound around and around, like a cyberpunk labyrinth of fire and technocratic idiosyncrasy.

The Player, Dale Rudy, made his way slowly and cautiously down these hallways, in search of his next target.

He and his reluctant partner, Robert Fields, had systematically and tactically eliminated all of the hostile contestants it seemed. The Laser Rifle whirred in his clammy, gloved hands as he stepped over the incapacitated Red Team member.

Judging by the green glow of the corridors, the enemy had encroached upon their territory, intent on seizing the all-important Generator.

While the object of the game varied depending on the match, it overall had remained the same over the centuries: eliminate the enemy.

The Laser Rifles they were assigned were equipped with high-capacity stasis rounds, lasers that targeted the central nervous system and put the target into a 'deep sleep,' as they called it.

What it really was, was essentially a coma. A state of low-activity stasis akin to that of a tardigrade, or "water bear," in preparation for the long trip back to Home Base.

Those who emerged victorious, the Programmers claim, were - in the long run - contributing to the longevity of the participants, and humanity as a whole.

Dale really wanted to believe that, but something about the Arena, and the Game, always felt off to him.

He crept down the tertiary corridor, which connected to one of the six secondary corridors which - in turn - connected to the central corridor of which there was one for each team, each connected to the Central Coliseum - where the Flag usually was in Single Flag Games.

Dale wanted to steer clear of this central battle ground, and stick to the tertiary corridors to make his way into the enemy base undetected. But approaching footsteps and voices prompted him to take cover behind a pylon.

Sweat began to accumulate on his temples as the voices elevated and the footsteps drew closer. The voices and talking soon escalated into shouting, and he could hear someone shouting for backup.

It was a Green.

But before he could react, the howling blast of a Laser Rifle reverberated throughout the Arena, and screaming soon followed.

As safe as they claimed the beams were, they sounded like the most painful and agonizing experience a human being could undertake.

And judging by the blunt force trauma of the bodies that had sustained laser blasts that he had seen, it certainly seemed that way.

Rudy activated his grappling hook, aimed at the grooves in the ceiling above the central area. As the Reds entered the room, Rudy remained fixed upon the central rotunda above the arena. Without a doubt in their mind that they were alone, they began to search the room.

"Rookies," thought Rudy, as he dropped down on the player that stood in the center of the room, careful to time it right so that his sweat did not drop upon his target prior to his landing.

He activated a proximity laser, rolling and ducking beneath the platform before the lasers went off. They formed a web layout, blasting out in all directions and simultaneously activating a field between the beams so that any caught in it were instantly incapacitated.

The first was downed by Rudy's shot to the head.

The second was taken out by the proximity charge. It was around this time that they were greeted by Logic and Cipher.

"Syntax said she'd seen a Red moving through one of the side corridors, booking it. And she's never wrong," said Logic.

"He's going after the generator," replied Rudy. He shed his gear, down to his under armor.

"I'm gonna beat him to it."

Before they could protest, Rudy was off.

Rudy first caught sight of the hostile as he was nearing the Green Room.

There were a multitude of lethal traps rigged around the octogonal room, so he knew how and where to trap him. He proceeded to intercept the trespasser at a particular juncture, but when he arrived - definitely before the enemy, as he'd counted his steps - there was nobody to be seen.

"Any sign," inquired Cipher over the comm link.

"Not a damn th-"

He was interrupted by an unforseen force and Rudy then saw the outline of a figure - a man - running full-speed down the corridor straight for the Green Room.

"DAMMIT! HE'S GOT A CLOAK POWER-UP!"

Rudy kept the Red in his sights, keeping track on him wherever he went in the Green Room.

He stood before the glowing Green Generator, the small rotating object. As he was reaching out to grab it, Rudy had been lining up his shot.

As he was about to fire, a green beam lept from a point above. Rudy looked above him to see Syntax.

The Red convulsed and dropped the Green Generator.

However good and fast Rudy was, Syntax was quicker and better. He had no problem acknowledging this fact.

As the green and red lighting converted to white, Rudy and Syntax knew they had won their team the match.

The Arena would spare them this day.

The eight-member team, composed of Fields, himself, Logic, Onyx, Cipher, Hellas, Xavier and Syntax assembled in the chamber that revealed itself, as the Map Room collapsed and folded away.

"Could this be it," Hellas inquired quietly to Logic at his side. "Nobody's gotten through seven rounds without losing all players."

"Nobody's gotten through seven rounds keeping any one, either," Logic replied.

Rudy tried to talk to Fields, but he simply ignored him.

"It was your stupid idea," he remembered Fields shouting, after their friend Alison - Fields' girlfriend at the time - was eliminated on their first round.

She was to be the only player besides this recent round to be eliminated.

The booming disembodied voice of Wotan, the lead counselor for the Programmers, announced that they had moved onto the next to last round. "Congratulations, Greens, in this installation's one-hundred-year history no team had made it through all seven rounds without being deported back to home base."

Frigg, his wife, interjected before he could complete his next sentence.

"Which means, you are to be broken up into four teams of two, and we will sort out who the best is, once and for all."

The Greens turned to one another in confusion.

"I thought this meant we were to be transported to home base? Like all the others, with the upgrades you promised," exclaimed Cipher.

Frigg laughed to herself.

"Oh, child - you have much to learn, like the rest of your kind."

The duos were deployed alone. A long dark corridor stretched before Rudy and Fields. Rudy turned to his partner, nodding. Fields ignored him and shouldered his Laser Rifle, proceeding into the darkness. Rudy followed close behind, and as the duo descended into the dark, bright red lighting pulsed to life around them, illuminating the way forward.

"Look," Rudy began. "I know we haven't gotten off on the right foot ever since Aly," but before he could proceed any further, Field fired off a round from his gun and turned angrily toward Rudy.

"Can you bring her back?"

Rudy sighed. "Do you want to get out of here?"

"CAN YOU BRING HER BACK, DALE? WELL, CAN YOU!?"

They proceeded into the Coliseum without further word.

"This is different," noted Xavier, as he and Onyx made their way toward the Coliseum. "The rooms, the hallways, pylons... they've all changed. Do you think...?"

Onyx cut him off, crouching behind a raised platform.

"I have an idea."

He elevated a scope on his rifle, and initiated a series of button combinations to elongate it into a sniping weapon.

"I'm gonna get up there, and you cover from below. Got me?"

Xavier nodded.

"But how will we know where anyone is? The landscape has changed completely. How did they arrange this in under a few hours?"

Onyx shrugged. "I dunno, maybe the rumors are true."

"About?"

"The Programmers aren't real."

Fields was becoming a problem.

In addition to taking pot-shots at Rudy, he was also activating the quite lethal traps set up across the Arena. Possibly out of spite for Rudy, but also possibly in a fit of psychotic suicidal tendencies. As the second bus-sized pylon erupted out of a wall to his right, also narrowly missing him, Fields's comments suggested that it was in fact a combination of the two.

"This was YOUR idea, YOUR STUPID, INSANE idea! I can't take this hell-hole anymore! I can't take it! I need OUT! I need OUT! HELP ME GET OUT!"

"I can't help us get out if you're trying to KILL ME, Fields," exclaimed Rudy. "How about helping me survive our incredibly gifted teammates, because if those pylons don't end in our death, THEY WILL."

Syntax had been watching Onyx, the sniper, from a hyperdimensional hiding place that she always liked to exploit. The right combination of twists, turns and flips at the right place and time would transport the Player into this chamber. She had mastered it.

Having studied the Arena more thoroughly than any of the other former-Greens, she had a theory that the Arena was in fact a pocket dimension unto itself.

A tesseract.

With this in mind, she had the perfect plan to execute a complete takeover of the Arena, and harness a power unmatched in human civilization.

She only had to perfectly execute this plan first...

The last words Onyx said were getting to him.

"Maybe the Programmers aren't real."

He shuddered as the silence began to get to him. Onyx heard the slamming and blasting of trap pylons and jets in the distance. There were also laser nets, that would - literally - slice one to bits.

But something else was off, notwithstanding the particularly lethal battlefield they were stuck with. Something was in the air, something that reeked of death and violence.

He was worried about Rudy, and Fields's instability was a wildcard.

But he was worried most of all about Syntax - an ex-Israeli Commando. She had the most combat experience, and was poised to emerge victorious, regardless of how brutish her Greek ally, Hellas, was capable of being.

Xavier saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He immediately brought his rifle to bare, contacting Onyx with this unsettling information.

"I've got you," said Onyx, his right eye mere inches away from the rifle sights.

As Onyx said this, however, he felt the weight of a human body upon his shoulders. He managed to get only one shot off before being completely consumed by unconsciousness.

Hellas took a shot from nowhere right in his arm as he moved on Xavier. He winced in pain and immediately took cover behind a pylon as Xavier opened fire on him. Hellas could only get off several random blind fire shots before succumbing to the pain. As Xavier circled through the entryway, he came upon a convulsing Hellas, hopeless to stop him.

"Should I finish you off or just let you squirm?"

Hellas managed to flip Xavier the bird as a gigantic pylon erupted from the wall to his side, crushing him to death.

Soon after, Hellas was himself consumed by the Great Unknown, his vision and consciousness fading from his mind.

Logic, a small man with a gifted brain, and Cipher, a petite twenty-year-old girl were in over their heads. As Logic narrowly avoided a blast of red-hot plasma, the Logic in his name left his body temporarily as he leaned into the jet attempting to smell the extract.

"What are you doing, don't SMELL it!"

"I was just trying to determine the chemical element-"

When Cipher shot him a look, he backed off.

"Alright, you're right."

He sighed. "Let's just try to let the others eliminate each other and we'll go in and try to finish off who's left. This is a game of survival. Nobody's been this good at the Game than us."

"You've got that right, Logic."

As the duo progressed deeper into the steadily-rearranging labyrinth of corridors, they laid eyes upon one of the Reds, in this case - Rob Fields.

Fields opened fire on Logic and Cipher, furiously firing his rifle and screaming like a maniac, completely exposing himself. Rudy angrily grabbed Fields and spun him around, slamming him against a wall.

"First, you try to kill yourself AND ME with booby traps. Then, you completely expose yourself to an enemy combatant. What is your problem-"

But before Rudy could finish his sentence, Fields cheap-shot a fist across his temple, temporarily blinding Rudy. The latter screamed in agony. "What the he-"

He was again cut off, this time by a foot to the sternum. Rudy vomited into his helmet, taking it off and throwing it as hard as he could at his aggressor. His conditioning kicked in, and he proceeded to melee Fields repeatedly with his helmet in one hand and his rifle in another.

Logic and Cipher evaded Fields only to run into the scariest of them all - Syntax.

"Where do you think YOU'RE going?"

They didn't stop to answer the question, they immediately booked it down a side corridor and into a rectangular room. Before they could make it out, however, the geometry of the room - and the Arena writ large - began to shift before their very eyes.

Rudy beat Fields bloody, until the latter was stumbling backwards uncontrollably - right into a laser net.

The beams ripped Fields limb from limb and then segmented his torso into a multitude of continuously replicating bloody bits.

Rudy screamed until his throat was sore and dug at his scalp until his fingernails were caked in blood.

It was at this exact moment that Logic and Cipher bore witness to Syntax engaging Rudy, perhaps the second-best player on the team, in direct combat. The latter was forced into the duo's area, and the trio were likewise forced to team up against Syntax, who pursued them into the steadily-collapsing and consolidating superstructure. Specifically, into a room shaped like a tetrahedron. The walls collapsed and slid into one another as the room took shape. Its structure consisted of portas on each of its flat sides - 4 to be exact.

Killer beams spewed out from each of the room's points - narrowly missing the trio as they exited through the opposite side they had come in through. Syntax was forced to vacate lest she be torn apart by the lasers.

The room she found herself in was no longer one single elongated rectangular chamber, but several units each in the shape of a four-dimensional tesseract...

The trio exited the tetrahedron to find themselves in a hyperspatial fractal corridor with an indeterminable number of ends and doorways. The further down they went, the higher the number of exits and entrances there were.

They took a gamble and opened one on the ceiling a ways down, finding themselves in an octohedral pyramid, with several 'rooms'. They found that these rooms were constantly changing, and demonstrated a variable size compared to the previous room.

"Uhh, guys, this isn't good," said Logic, pointing behind him.

"Oh, fuck!"

Rudy didn't repeat Cipher's exclamation, but he certainly shared it in his facial expression. Any trace or sign whatsoever of the previous rooms they had visited was completely absent. The rooms had been looping in on themselves at the quantum level and it was anyone's guess as to how small - or large - they had trasngressed beyond the physical plane.

"No," he heard Logic yell. They turned back to see the rooms before them collapsing in on themselves as well. "We'll be smashed into a single atom if we don't find a way out."

They looked before and behind them, and knew there was no escape.

But Cipher had an idea.

"Remember Onyx's conspiracy theories?"

They nodded.

"He and Syntax had a theory that this was like a tesseract, or a four-dimensional superstructure containing three-dimension substructures. If that is true, then much of what we see may be an optical illusion, tricking us into cohabitating with threats to our very existence. Do you see what I'm getting at?"

They nodded, but slowly and entirely unsure of what she was getting at.

"That means," she pointed at the collapsed rooms behind them. "That we can still go back the way we came, despite what that looks likes."

They exchanged glances.

"Well, if we're going to do this we need to do it now!"

"Come on!"

She then ran right at the wall of condensed mass, and appeared to stretch into infinity.

Rudy and Logic looked behind to see the approaching wall of violence and immense size and speed, and knew they couldn't wait any longer. They followed Cipher, and stepped through the other side as if there were nothing there at all. In fact there hadn't been. It was all an illusion.

The still-approaching wall of terror was not, and continued after them. They understood immediately they had to keep running, because they knew if they did not catch up to Cipher, they were dead. Rounding a corner, they saw Cipher right as the room collapsing in on itself was right on their heels. Logic could feel the wind of the rotating mass against the hairs of his neck as they came to the opening to the outside, diving through right as Rudy felt it grabbing at his foot.

It caught his heels as he was pulled through by Cipher, and they stood up to find themselves in a stellated octohedron, with a doorway at each point of the room.

"I think this one's safe."

"Thanks, Cipher. Okay," said Rudy. "Each of us needs to check a room, make sure their safe."

"How, exactly, are we going to do that," asked Cipher.

"Take any object floating freely, a clip, a strap, anything - and just toss it in."

Rudy's strategy worked. Cipher's first room demonstrated a room with intense heat, at such a point it melted Cipher's glove strap into a hardened black strip of bacon. Logic's first was one that began closing in on itself after he tossed a pauldron from his armor into the center of the room, and Cipher's second was a room filled with spikes if you made any sound.

Both of Rudy's were explosive and light-based, the latter being one that would blind you if you stared right into it. Luckily he'd had a mirror.

But Cipher's second room demonstrated a path forward - a sphere.

The trio repeated the process for several rooms, until they found a glitch in the process.

"This... can't be right. This isn't a room... it's... like... another... dimension..."

Syntax knew.

Period.

She knew.

Syntax knew it all, everything about this place; all of its rules, all of its strengths and weaknesses, all of its secrets.

She'd known.

But now someone else was about to know. And she couldn't have that... no. That would spoil the surprise. That would upend the plan she intended to execute.

That simply would not do.

She removed her arm, and thus all nerve endings, from the hyperdimensional pool forming at the equipotential flux vertices at the furthest and outermost apogee of the geometry of the room.

The Amplituhedron.

The bastards had figured out a way to get to its particular pocket dimension within the complex, and now Syntax had to figure out a way to stop them.

Fast.

Quantum physics offered little in the way of practical usage for spacetime continuum-based organisms, but Syntax was sure that with enough manipulation of the metaphysical superstructure of her location indicative therein, she could find a hook or angle from which to launch her broadband attack.

After submerging her body into the hyper-space for a half-hour and meditating on the correct frequency as was used by Buddhists in the 20th and 21st centuries to connect to the aether, Syntax was able to locate the interlopers just as they had come to a decision to enter the other realm.

They had come to a juncture, roughly the height and width of a ventilation duct on a star ship, between rooms which was where they found a fractal opening between entrances.

"It looks as though," began Rudy, as he put his foot through the wall - revealing it to not be a wall at all but a corridor, "we are not in three spatial dimensions at all, but four."

He sat down, and Cipher clarified, "these rooms are not inherently the size and shape our consciousness is perceiving them to be. In all actuality we have been progressing down a straight path the entire time."

She was greeted by stupefied silence.

They debated the issue, with Rudy pleading indifference and Cipher and Logic debating opposite ends of the theoretical spectrum - with Cipher contending that this is, indeed, the hyperspace geometry Onyx and Syntax had speculated on for so many months, and Logic suggesting it is a holographic interface or a trap.

Eventually, Rudy ended up siding with Cipher, and they agreed to step through the threshold into the fractal unknown - until they were interrupted by Syntax.

An electromagnetic pulse sent them hurtling backward into the small room, and the trio were again pursued by Syntax - although, not in the way they were expecting.

They attempted to double-back into the stellated hedron, only to be greeted by a rapidly-rotating room of malevolence and violence. Rudy immediately pushed his cohorts backward into the juncture.

The next room was also like this - less sides, but more room to spin around in.

It looked like - as Rudy correctly speculated - Syntax had gotten into the hard drive of the complex.

"But, how," Cipher half-exclaimed and half-interrogated.

"I dunno," said Rudy as he dodged the swinging vertices, "you two get into that doorway, I'll distract Syntax."

Cipher gave him a look, like, "you better still have that Generator, and not Syntax."

But he did.

Not only he, but also Syntax - the latter of which was using it for self-fulfilling purposes.

And Rudy was about to bring all of that to an end. He successfully navigated the Syntax rooms, crossing the laser rooms, explosion rooms and light rooms with great effort. He crossed the interdimensional-scale rooms - including the ones that collapsed in on themselves and rearranged shape in violent ways.

The most difficult room in which to use the generator was the sliding dimension one.

In this one, Rudy had to face off against his Negative Self. The hypercube stopped at nothing to consume your consciousness, even going so far as to have you killed by yourself from another dimension.

The first time he came in contact with this Anti-Rudy, he hadn't told anyone... for the specific purpose that he had seen himself sliced in half by Syntax's energy blade.

But now, here he was - staring his demons down face-to-face.

Then... the lights went out.

Dale was left confronting an evil clone of himself in the pitch-black darkness. He felt pain in his left-side ribcage, followed by warm fluid.

He wasn't about to die, he wasn't about to give up.

He reached into his rucksack and pulled out the Generator, he hadn't used it in this room. Rudy activated the Generator.

The lights came back on.

The creature was right above him.

As it reached for him, he grabbed its exaggerated talons and yanked it to the floor with every ounce of strength, pumped an entire volley of plasma laser fire directly into its face.

With that, Rudy used the generator to transport him to his teammates.

What he found waiting for him left him in awe.

It didn't matter, Syntax mused as the window to her consciousness shattered in on itself.

It didn't matter because she had stepped beyond the temporal bubble encapsulating the Arena. She stepped up to an opening in the side of the Acropolis and looked out at the spiraling and intersecting fractal vertices interlacing with the meta-material makeup of this world.

She saw the endless green horizon stretched out before her ad-infinitum.

Syntax had found God, and because she found it first - it was hers, rightfully, and no one else's.

They had passed between the complex's boundaries in a form of glitch during Syntax's hack, and they now stared down into an infinitely-replicating fractal room the size and height of many cities. Life forms and beings of light and hardware, some of them human - others not, commuted across large crossbeams and walkways zigzagged and corkscrewed between and across the infinite abyss of light and metal.

"There's an entire civilization in here," whispered Cipher. "What the hell is this place? This isn't an Arena."

"It's a prison," added Logic.

The trio made their way up the shaft, bypassing the electro-organic life forms with little effort or bother. Only once did they run into a troublesome crowd down a back-corridor on their way to the express elevator they'd seen upon entering.

The interlopers all had differing heads, each resembling a different animal or organism. As they attempted to hold the trio hostage with laser knives, Rudy and the others pretended to be unarmed, until the latter brandished a laser blade and quickly cut down the enemies.

The robbers rolled about on the ground in agony while Rudy ushered them forward. Cipher gave one of them a good solid kick and they then entered the large cubic structure.

Rudy ordered the mechanism to take them to the top floor. The lift did as it was commanded. They zipped past an innumerable amount of social and cultural sectors, an unfathomable depth of history and time was displayed before them. How long had they been there, Rudy wondered.

Eventually they came to the top.

The trio looked out upon a treacherous landscape of violent storms and large rips in what looked like spacetime itself cascading across a field of danger and terror.

"So, you arrive, at last," said a voice behind them.

Syntax emerged from a slice in mid-air, lowering herself while bits of the Arena spiraled around her.

"You... how... how...?"

"How? You want to know how I am doing this? Time... does not exist here. While you and the others have been playing your games, I have been here for decades. Centuries, even."

"So... while we've been trying to figure out how to get out...?"

"Correct. I have been here. Collecting souls. Gaming the system myself. Hijacking time and space and manipulating the Arena and the system it operates upon to create a New Society. Do you like it?"

"NO! It's...it's MADNESS! While we've been in here suffering, you've been out THERE playing GOD! And not even a good one, an Evil God. A cruel one."

"Oh hush now."

She approached Rudy and lifted him into the air with sheer willpower, crushing his windpipe.

"You are weak, and the weak deserve to die."

"Go... NOW!"

Rudy then dropped the generator and kicked it with his foot, activating it.

As Syntax recoiled, Cipher and Logic took the elevator back down.

"Bottom floor! NOW!"

As the generator spiraled out of control, and the structure began to collapse, Syntax decided she would take one final bite out of Rudy.

As the platform spun around, disintegrating as they ran, Cipher turned to grab Logic and pull him in, but before she could do so, he was ripped apart by Syntax's telekinetic energy. She screamed, and tried to lash out at Syntax, but Rudy pushed her into the lift, and activated it.

"Go!"

Syntax grabbed him and activated her blade, aiming straight for his heart.

Rudy activated his own, blocking her's at the last second.

"Not gonna be that easy."

She tried to use her telekinesis, but it was useless in the face of the Generator.

"Now, for my final act."

Rudy honed in on the device, but Syntax saw this and immediately moved to intercept. She struck out at him with her blade.

It was a hit, Rudy had received the full length of her blade as he reached for the Generator. He was a goner.

"You're half-right, Rudy. I'm not playing God..."

She drove the blade further in.

"I am God."

Then, her face folded into a frown as she realized that Rudy held the Generator, and it was whirring down into an unstable state.

"No..."

The Generator's whirring deepened into a threatening beep.

"You're just another statistic."

The lift managed to make it just in time. The elevator led to a corridor leading to a bright glowing beam of light. Cipher - the only Player in decades, perhaps centuries, to clear the Arena - stepped forth into the glowing pillar of illumination.

The machine orbiting Epsilon Eridanus wasn't just a machine. It was an advanced silicon-based life-form. A killing machine, designed by an ancient civilization known as the Programmers to collect consciousness and life-force itself.

Cipher didn't know what future awaited her, or what life could be found outside the Arena, as she spiraled away in the capsule toward the speed of light. All she knew for certain was that she was free.

And that she would never see any of her friends again.

As she came upon this realization, she began to weep.