Circuit World Read online

  Copyrighted Material

  Circuit World Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Pierce

  Book design and layout copyright © 2019 by Daniel Pierce

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

  Daniel Pierce

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  Circuit World

  Book 1 in the Circuit World Series

  Daniel Pierce

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

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  About the Author

  1

  I cracked my neck, and then I bent back, feeling every bone in my body snap with resistance as I sat down in my custom chair, surrounded by the gear of a professional gamer.

  I’m 24 years old, and for the past three years I have been living the dream of just about every young guy my age—every young guy living in the first world, I mean. My screen name is Si1ence, and with the usual blend of luck, skill, and quick fingers, I’ve built a resume good enough that I live a life in the digital wilds.

  I am, in every sense of the world, a killer. Just not in this world.

  As I adjusted my chair, medals clinked with deep tones—awards from tournaments across the world. I prefer cash, caffeine, or crowds, but in a pinch, carrying away and award is acceptable, especially if it’s put around my neck by a beautiful girl.

  I know I’m not—well, normal it too strong a word. Let’s say standard. My life isn’t typical, and no one was more pissed than my parents when I chose to live a life doing battle on servers, instead of a college classroom like my other friends.

  My parents were not happy at first, but after seeing a few monthly statements from my bank, they changed their tune. Shortly after leaving college, I left my competitive team as well, but that didn’t stop the checks from coming in. I had already built a strong foundation for my brand.

  Fans didn’t just follow my team, they followed me. I started a YouTube channel where I would play and review games. More sponsorships flowed in just to get a mention on my videos. Fans donated simply because they wanted to see more. I got tons of free shit from everywhere—products from my sponsors to test out, presents from my fans, stuff like that. As viewership increased, so did the paychecks from the streaming sites I worked with. From that, I got even more sponsors and was able to sell more merchandise. People just could not get enough silence.

  For the next year or so, I followed a simple algorithm for success in my line of work: pick a popular game, play it, record it, review it. Among my friends and fellow gamers, I refer to it as PPRR, for pick, play, record, review—sometimes, PR-squared. It was that simple. I actually had enough clout in the gaming community to call up a company and request my gamertag be made available if it was taken by another player, which, often times, it was.

  Si1ence is a fairly generic gamertag, but like most veteran gamers, I stuck with my childhood character name as an homage to a simpler time. I thought it was a cool name when I was five, so I was determined to make it my gamertag for the rest of my life. The companies I called up would often honor my request and change the name of the previous account owner, usually just adding numbers to the end of their tag, like Si1ence156 or something like that.

  After leaving my competitive team, I stuck mostly to the games I was passionate about: massively multiplayer online games—called MMO’s for short. If you’re not familiar, these games are like good ole’ World of Warcraft or Everquest Online. They’re usually based in either science-fiction or fantasy worlds, or, sometimes, a combination of the two. Character types, known as “classes”, are a common element in most of these games. Silence always dual-classes as a thief/mage. If a game does not have that class combination as an option, I just don’t play it. This is also a throwback to my childhood, but it has an even more personal significance to me than the origin of my gamertag.

  I grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons with my dad, my late uncle Jim, and some of their friends, and I always gravitated towards the magic-using rogues. To me, those classes just make sense. Sure, a pure thief is decent enough, but think about a thief that can literally make himself invisible. Or one who can cast a spell to impersonate someone else. The possibilities are endless there. Even in the sci-fi games where literal magic doesn’t exist, there’s always an equivalent class I can use, often based around psychic abilities or some kind of extra-dimensional manipulation.

  It all adds up to the same thing. But all that aside, when I play these games with that kind of character, I often find myself drowned in nostalgia, reliving my childhood, hanging out with my cool uncle Jim and feeling like one of the guys. I’m always chasing that feeling; there’s nothing that brings me more satisfaction in life. There is no greater high.

  So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past few years—playing games, making money, and graciously accepting payment and gifts from my adoring fans and sponsors. My fans went from numbering in the thousands to hundreds of thousands to a couple million in that short time. Freshman year, I would have thought someone was crazy if they told me what my life would turn into.

  So, on this day-- a day like any other, I was back at my “workstation” after having just finished up editing on a video. I began uploading it, which always takes longer than I would like, and cracked open a can of Hwangso Gong, my favorite energy drink—a gift from a Korean sponsor of mine.

  With my multi-hundred-dollar headphones—another sponsored gift—resting snugly back around my ears, I turned on some Tool—another nostalgic tip of the hat to my childhood—and began skimming my emails, as was my preferred way of passing the time while I waited for my uploads to finish.

  Each day brought at least 200 new emails for me to wade through—a combination of promotional offers, sponsor communications, and fan mail. I could have reduced a lot of these with my spam filter settings, but I had taken a pretty relaxed approach to that after having previously almost overlooked a very appealing offer from about a year prior. No matter how specific I got, my filter always seemed to have a hard time distinguishing between useless junk ads and business proposals, so I just decided to forgo the thing almost entirely, save for classifying a handful of repeat-spammers for what they were.

  It was no big deal, only requiring some extra clicks to get rid of the worthless stuff. The way I saw it, if a few dozen clicks a day could make me several thousand dollars, there was no reason not to go that extra mile.

  I skimmed through the first few fan emails. Those made my day, because I know how hard it is to make in this arena, and I also understand that luck had been my friend.

  Less common, but still fairly fre
quent, were the lesser brands that wanted a mention in my videos or wanted me to try out their products. I would check them out every once in a while, but usually I’d pass them over with no more than a glance, if even that much. Like I said, I had several hundred emails to swim through every day, and the virtual world was always waiting.

  I thought I had come across one such email after reading some fan mail. This one kind of stuck out because the sender field for the message was blank, kind of like getting a phone call from a private number. Nigerian prince, I thought. My old friend, the displaced Nigerian prince. He once again needed my help in reclaiming his rightful place on the throne of his country after his family had been killed by an evil usurper. He had narrowly escaped with his own life, and was looking to take back what was rightfully his.

  The only problem was that he needed the capital to do it. If I could graciously provide him with $100,000 through a money order, he would guarantee that my generosity would be repaid tenfold once he had overthrown this evil tyrant. He simply needed my money upfront to fund his small uprising. It sounded like a noble effort, and I always wanted to help him every time I got the email—I really did—but I could never bear to part with that kind of money. I would always say a silent prayer for him, check the box next to the email, and hit delete.

  I had already checked the box but stopped short upon seeing the title of the message. It read, A Once-In-A-Lifetime Offer For Si1ence. My cursor hovered over the “delete” button. The sender knew my gamertag. This was not my friend, the Nigerian prince. It had to be one of those nobody-sponsors, which usually suffered the same fate at the end of my cursor.

  I’ll never know why I clicked on that mail, and I’m not sure I’m ever meant to know.

  It was an invitation to try out an MMO that I had never heard of, called Circuit World. It promised to be the most immersive MMO ever, even. I stifled a laugh upon reading that. All of these dime-a-dozen half-assed pay-to-win money-grubbing MMO’s promised things like that. To accompany their ads, they usually employed some kind of sex appeal aspect geared towards horny young men like myself. There would be a buxom, scantily-clad blonde elf, and the ad would read something like, “Your Kingdom Awaits You, My Lord” or “Play A Game Where You Can Do Whatever You Want”.

  This email struck me as odd because it was completely bare-bones, using none of those laughable tactics to draw me in. There were no pictures to reference, no description of gameplay, or anything like that. It simply wanted me, silence, to beta test the “newest, most immersive MMO ever”. There wasn’t even a signature at the bottom.

  “This is pitiful,” I said. While other attempts to get me to participate bordered on ridiculous, this email displayed a true lack of effort. “I’m not your charity fund.”

  My cursor moved back to the delete button, ready to obliterate the meaningless offer into nothingness, but I was once again stopped in my attempt to do so. This time I balked because of something beyond my control. My computer screen went black.

  “Fuck!” I shouted, slamming my fist on the table.

  I consider my self a patient guy, but when it came to my computer or internet messing up, I had little tolerance. No doubt I was going to have to restart the upload process on my video.

  I moved to press the power button but realized that the computer had not actually turned off. There was a blinking neon-green underscore in the upper left corner of the black screen, like on the ancient MS DOS machines.

  The moment I noticed it, other characters of the same color began to pop up on the monitor, as if someone was typing to me. When they had finished, the completed message read, Do you accept our challenge? Y/N.

  I stared at it for a long moment, thinking that it must have been in reference to the email I was just reading. They had my attention, whoever they were. I was definitely curious, but I was also suspicious that I had just given my computer a virus. Maybe, I thought, it was time to update my spam filter.

  After a minute or so—I wasn’t watching the clock—the line disappeared to be replaced by another question: Don’t you want to know? I thought it was a little odd that the last word of this question was italicized because the old MS DOS machines did not allow for that kind of formatting, to the best of my knowledge. Though, I thought, this actually was not an MS DOS window, just some kind of potentially malicious software made to look that way. Yes, I thought, I actually do want to know. A little delayed this time, the same Y/N prompt appeared to punctuate the question as before.

  I reached forward with an eager hand to hit the Y key but stopped, almost having a heart attack in response to a sudden banging noise.

  “Oh fuck!” I shouted in surprise, looking all around for the source of the sound, thinking for a split-second that I might have stumbled upon some digital Jumanji and this thumping I heard was the pounding heart of the game beckoning me to play. That, or a tree was about to fall on my townhouse.

  It was not the heart of the game or a tree, I soon discovered, but a simple assertive knock at my door. My bedroom door. Inside my house. My house, where I lived alone.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered.

  There was a rack of decorative swords hanging over my bed. I grabbed the katana I was most fond of and unsheathed it. Its tip was pointed enough to stab through someone for sure, and the blade was mildly sharp. It would certainly cut a motherfucker if put enough effort into it. I don’t mess around.

  I crept toward the door and swung it open, brandishing my blade.

  “What the…?” No one was there.

  A simple brown box was at my feet, resting just on the other side of the threshold. I stepped over it an into the hallway, looked from right to left. No one was around, which was both comforting and unsettling at the same time.

  Holding my sword aloft, I did a quick sweep of the house. Ever since some asshole jacked my roommate’s laptop freshman year, I had always been mindful to keep my door locked. Even after I moved away from the dorm life, I carried that habit with me into my young adulthood, thinking it was always best to take precaution. The doors were the first places I checked for intrusion. Both still remained locked. It was possible, I thought, that someone had picked it and then relocked it upon leaving, but I thought that was a lot of effort to just drop a package off when they could simply dingdong ditch me and leave the box on the stoop.

  I checked the windows. Again, there was no sign of intrusion—no shattered glass or anything. There was one window which had a broken latch, but it had been painted shut before I bought the place, and I had never done anything to fix it. In the unlikely event that a would-be intruder discovered this, it would take a good bit of elbow grease to pry the damn thing open, but it could theoretically be done. If I was home at the time someone tried this, I would likely hear it if my music was not on full-blast, which it had not been. I found that this is not what happened though because the paint remained undisturbed.

  I felt my face get hot and sweat begin to bead on my brow. Somebody had entered my house, that was for certain. Another unnerving fact was that I was the only person in existence who had the key to my house. Not even my parents were given a spare. I began to worry that this person was still hiding around somewhere.

  I frantically hurried around my house, looking everywhere a person might fit—behind the curtains, in the kitchen pantry, the tub, the fucking clothes hamper. You would think that each unsuccessful search would help to ease my mind, but it only worked to do the opposite. I pulled the attic ladder down and did a thorough search up there. Someone accessing the attic is another thing I would have likely heard, but it did not hurt to check.

  Upon a 30-minute search of my 1800 square-foot townhouse, looking everywhere I could possibly think, I was forced to give up, but I refused to give up my suspicions, declaring, “I know you’re here somewhere! You better come out! I’ll call the fucking cops!”

  I waited around a few more minutes for a response, but nothing happened. With a huff, I returned to my room. I had forgotten about the
package in that time and was surprised anew to rediscover it.

  “What the fuck even…?” Probably anthrax, I thought.

  I picked the box up and brought it over to my desk, clearing off the half-dozen empty cans of Hwangso Gong and putting it where they had been. Some motion on the monitor drew my attention away from the package. More words were on the screen now. This time it was a command which read: Touch for yes. You’ll know where.

  I figured they must be talking about whatever the hell was in the box, so I jabbed the tip of my sword into the packaging tape and dramatically sliced it open. There was a shiny black something-or-other peeking out at me from a sea of packaging peanuts. I pulled it out and scooted the box off the counter, placing this new object where the package had been.

  At first, I thought it was a helmet of some sort, but there was no place for a head to go. It appeared to be a solid black egg-thing. I turned it around and found a hand-shaped indention. I hovered my hand over it without pressing down. It looked to be a perfect fit, as if the thing were made for me. Interesting, I thought. As if to prompt me to follow through with the action, the whole object began emitting this faint blue pulse from the inside, a blue as neon as the MS DOS-green on my computer monitor.

  I looked back to the screen and saw that the previous command was replaced by another message: Are you ready for battle?

  “Yes, I fucking am,” I whispered, touching the cool surface of the black object.