SpeedRunner (Tower of Babel Book 1)

  Tower Of Babel: Speedrunner

  By Adam Elliott

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with.

  Tower of Babel: Speedrunner

  Copyright © 2017 Adam Elliott. All rights reserved. Including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the author.

  For Maea,

  You put up with way too much.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Epilogue

  From the Author

  Prologue

  This can’t be happening. That was all Anna Visneski could think as she stared down at the ruin of her right arm, trapped in the wreckage of what had recently been her father's SUV. It didn't even feel like her arm anymore, worse yet, it didn't feel like anything anymore. Despite the ever-expanding pool of blood, there was no pain, nothing but a heightened buzz in her body as her mind spun trying to make sense of the situation.

  They had been on their way to the city, just a typical school day. It was all still a little fuzzy, but she remembered the hard bump of the car as they drove onto the Manhattan bridge. She'd been texting with a couple of friends to pass the time, then her father had screamed-

  "Dad!" Even shouting his name sent a wave of agony through her, but it was nothing compared to the sudden, gut-wrenching panic. Her body protested every inch of her feeling bruised as she struggled merely to roll her body far enough to see the driver's seat.

  Her father was gone.

  Anna's immediate thought was that the force of the crash must have thrown him from the vehicle. But that wasn't right, even in her dazed state she could see that. His seat belt was buckled, and the windshield was still more intact than not on his side of the SUV. She knew she'd passed out in the immediate aftermath of the crash, but her dad would never leave his sixteen-year-old princess to wake up pinned and terrified.

  "Dad! Someone! Anyone! Please help me!" The shock was fully giving way to panic now. Something was very wrong here. Through the cracked windshield she could see dozens of vehicles piled up as part of the massive collision, but what she couldn't see were people. There was no one going from car to car looking to help, no one stumbling around in a daze or on their phones calling their insurance. Strangest of all, there didn't even appear to be anyone in the vehicles themselves. Even the worst of the wrecks, cars so damaged that it would take the Jaws of Life to extract a passenger, were frighteningly vacant.

  This can’t be… they can’t all have… In her dazed state, she briefly wondered if she was hallucinating. She felt level headed, but had she simply cracked something in her skull when she'd struck it? Or was the warmth trickling down her destroyed arm taking her wits with it? This couldn't be happening; people didn't just disappear.

  It also didn’t matter. Right now she needed help, and her screams were going unanswered.

  Her phone lay in pieces on the floor of the car, so it wouldn't be of much help. Her father's, by comparison, had weathered the crash in the way only a phone in an ugly two-inch thick black safety case could have managed, still pristine and functional on its dash mount. When the day was done, she was going to be eating crow about mocking her father's ‘unstylish' choices.

  Anna didn’t know his password, but she didn't need to. Just power it on and hit the emergency call button. At least, that was the idea.

  At the push of a button, the phone sprang to life in her free hand, however, what it showed her was unexpected. Her father's lock screen was supposed to be a family photo, a shot of the four of them smiling and laughing on vacation. Instead, it showed a black screen lit by a single silver word.

  Babel.

  Anna's thumb stroked across the screen as much on instinct as anything else, and the image shifted to show a promotional page. In the few seconds, it took her mind to register what she was looking at she absorbed enough to know it was an advertisement for some MMORPG, making the same kind of ludicrous claims about lifelike graphics and realistic combat that she'd seen on a hundred similar ads.

  Her thumb stabbed down on the back button to clear the ad, but to her frustration that simply returned her to the original screen with its black background and gleaming silver text. The home button was an equal failure, as were each of the increasingly complex button combinations she used in an attempt to bring the phone back to a state where she could use it.

  “Goddamnit! Work you piece of garbage!" She shouted at the phone, suddenly aware of the warm wetness of tears on her cheeks and the way the device was shaking like a leaf in her one good hand. Fear and pain were getting the better of her, and she knew it.

  With a deep breath, she focused her gaze on the screen and began to swipe right to left once again. If she couldn't simply skip out of it, perhaps she could close the stupid thing if she got to the end of it.

  Even with her thumb racing not all of the text was lost on her as she flipped from page to page and with each little snippet that her brain absorbed her fervor to reach the end diminished. Her initial estimate of the thing had been correct, it was an MMO, but the rest of this… it had to be a joke.

  It claimed that ‘Babel' was the world's first Real-Life Massive Multiplayer Role Playing Game. It claimed that this would take place in a tower with a hundred levels and that the first person to reach the top of that tower would be granted a wish. And it claimed that the game's titular Tower of Babel was on the isle of Manhattan.

  Which, now that she looked, definitely explained the enormous spiraling monolith that was growing in the midst of the Manhattan skyline.

  Chapter One

  "And... time! There you have it, my loyal viewers." Cayden grinned into the camera offset a few feet to the side of his screen, giving his best impression of a carefree roguish grin. As if the on screen heart-rate monitor synced to his watch didn't show his heart pounding. He had streamed the run half a dozen times since he'd decided on his methodology, but with days ticking away, Cayden had honestly expected to leave this last task undone. It was probably a good omen, right? "A full 1-101 all boss clear of Runes of the Guardians in... six days, five hours and five minutes. On
e hundred and forty-nine hours, and I undercut Seraph89's record by a full seven minutes and two seconds!"

  Cayden lifted his hands and rewarded himself with a ludicrous golf clap as his eyes trailed towards the comments on the side of the live-stream. It was just a wall of scrolling text, moving faster than his eyes could even hope to follow. His viewership today was an all time high for him, over two hundred and ninety thousand concurrent viewers. That might even be a record in and of itself for a non-Babel stream.

  "Thank you, thank you. You're all too kind." Cayden hammed it up for just a few moments longer, relishing in the sweetness of his victory. The hundred and forty-nine hours he'd put in was for just this attempt alone. All told he'd probably put well over a thousand into RotG over the past year. It was an overwhelming amount of effort simply to shave seven minutes off a world record. Were it any other game he probably wouldn't have put in the effort, even if the previous record holder was a dick.

  But this was RotG, the closest thing on the market to a Babel knock off.

  "Alright, so. Before I take a shower, eat an entire pizza and fall into bed I know there has been a ton of speculation about what game is next on my chopping block. It's probably why there are... damn, three hundred and six thousand of you. I feel a little on the spot."

  Cayden was nearly as good at playing the nerdy, somewhat self-conscious young man persona as he was at the games themselves. He had the sort of face for it, with smoothly shaven features and big blue eyes hidden behind a shock of stylishly unstyled black hair. He looked like the pre-drug addict version of every boy band member from the dawn of pop music, handsome yet fragile

  At least, that was his own high opinion of himself. He'd read a less charitable description a week ago on The Escapist that described him as "The default setting in every create-a-character mode ever made." That stung.

  "I could drag it out but... the speculation is right. The article posted early this week got my birthday down to a tee. I'm seventeen on Monday, which means I'll be leaving for NYC this weekend."

  That certainly got their attention. If the chat log was flying by earlier, it had jumped into warp speed by now. Individual words disappeared as quickly as they arrived, with only complicated Ascii meme's sticking around long enough for the eye to process. A textual uproar was what he expected, and it was what he got, an unruly virtual mob ready to riot if he didn't throw them an olive branch.

  "I know it sucks, but this isn't the end of my channel! I am sure that a lot of you are worried that I'll just become another streamer doing the same old same old on the first twenty or so floors. Or worse." He let that hang for just a moment in spite of himself. There was a reason why streams from Babel had a five-minute time delay by law. "Let's be honest though. I'm not just any sort of gamer. I'm a Speedrunner.”

  “And that is what I am going to do. I'm going to be broadcasting live, day in and day out as I progress through the tower. The progression guilds have a head start of over two years on me. But while they were out banging their head against undiscovered dangers, I've been studying them, and I've been studying the classics." Cayden paused, drawing a breath and steadying himself. "I'm going to do it in four months."

  That would get a reaction. There were only about five thousand players currently active on the highest floors, and almost all of those had been playing release day. Even with the current stalemate, he was proposing to run the same content as the most skilled players in the world, in a sixth of the time.

  As expected the chat was afire, racing past at a warp speed that made it look like one of the background screens from the matrix. He'd just assured some good viewership for the first few hours of his stream. If only because people would be watching to see how quickly his hubris led to his downfall. "On that note folks, it has been fun. My Twitter will have updates on my travel time, progress, and the start of my stream. Until then, keep running."

  He reached out, a few clicks of his mouse minimizing the game-play window and then closing out his stream. A few more brought up a wire-frame view of the infamous tower.

  Even as nothing more than a foot tall rotating 3d image the tower was equal parts imposing and majestic. In reality, it was enormous, Three kilometers in diameter, its peak rested one hundred and one kilometers above sea level. That put it a full kilometer above the agreed upon the boundary of 'outer-space,' no doubt by design. At such a dramatic size, much of the hemisphere could see its lights on a clear night.

  Despite its size, the tower didn't want for detail when viewed up close either. Hundreds of thousands of archways ringed its surface, each a unique work of art cut from the unique yellow-white stone of the tower's outer surface. Those closest to the ground held carvings of bravery and battle, of men and women squaring off against all manner of creatures in fighting to the death. Further up the tower, the sculptures became progressively more unusual. Explorers had found carvings of everything from knock-knock jokes to naughty pictorials, to a hundred arch long stretch depicting the entire plot of the original Star Wars trilogy. Strangely, the prequels were nowhere to be found.

  Regardless of their content, any one of the archways would have looked at home as the centerpiece of a lavish exhibit, and yet there were so many that even two years after launch day there were still thousands left to photograph in detail.

  Launch day. The two words sent an involuntary shiver through Cayden. That was the most common name for it in pop culture, particularly among players and other gamers. Among other groups, the names were understandably more cynical. The East Coast Tragedy. The Manhattan Vanishing. The New York Massacre.

  Politicians who threw around that last one always bothered Cayden. To him, a massacre always seemed like a Texas Chainsaw sort of thing. Lots of gore and bodies.

  New York didn't have any of the latter.

  Names for the incident were so varied in part because no one knew what had happened. There were clues, indeed, but only a few solid facts.

  At 8:45 am on 3rd April 2025, the daytime population of Manhattan, roughly four million people, vanished. Recording devices that survived what came next uniformly shorted out at the moment of the event, giving an exact time but no further details.

  Fifteen minutes later, the earthquakes started. Without a doubt the largest in east coast history they radiated from the now vacant island. Much of the iconic skyline was damaged or destroyed by the quakes, and the surrounding areas in Jersey and the remaining boroughs fared little better.

  Flyovers from a Virginia airbase alleviated the initial fears that the sudden and total radio silence from Manhattan was the result of a nuclear strike. What they did reveal was arguably more troubling, however. A new addition to the skyline.

  In the forty minutes between the initial vanishing and the first overflight, the tip of Babel had risen nearly a hundred and ten stories from the ground of what had previously been Times Square. It would continue to tear free of the ground, with correspondingly brutal earthquakes, for the next three days until it finally reached its full height and revealed its entrance.

  Ridiculously, the US government tried to force a total media blackout regarding the existence of the tower in the immediate aftermath of its discovery. A miles wide tower that grew by hundreds of stories in a matter of minutes, and they thought they could cover it up. The hubris was incredible, particularly because the tower had its own press release.

  At the same time, millions were vanishing into thin air in New York; another impossibility was sweeping the globe, a hijacking of every form of media known to man. TV's displayed a looping broadcast on every channel, in every language. Newspapers that had already gone to print were delivered with a full page ad that no one recalled inserting. Computer monitors, e-book readers, at least one recorded instance of a skywriter... Cayden was fairly sure that somewhere in the world a primitive tribe found unexpected smoke signals spelling out the announcement.

  Whatever the medium, the opening message was the same:

  Babel

  The Great
Emperor has issued his challenge.

  From the ruins of the Old World rise the Tower. Its doors will soon open, and the great game will begin.

  A hundred floors and a hundred challenges await the worthy.

  And to the victor? A Wish of Unlimited Power.

  Needless to say, the world was shocked.

  The US government reacted as one would expect them to respond. The military cordoned off the island, and special forces units attempted to raid the tower itself on April 6th when the entrance finally came to the surface. It didn't go well.

  The announcement had been more than a few sentences of text. Every written version of it had come with an exhaustive list of rules, the Terms and Conditions. One of the most prominent among them was that the island of Manhattan was to be considered an international sanctuary, that no one should be prohibited from journeying to the island by any government or individual, save for a few small exceptions carved out for dangerous criminals and the like

  The various nations of the world railed against these restrictions. However, they were up against a force that vanished millions into thin air and crafted a tower that defied the very laws of physics. They didn't stand a chance.

  The terms and conditions were enforced by some sort of power, an enchantment or hex. Obey them, and no harm came to you, try to refuse them, and you were subject to punishment in measure to your violation. The armed forces came down with a terrible, though non-lethal, case of what appeared to be dysentery within the first night of their encampment. The commanders who issued the orders found themselves similarly affected, while the president began to suffer from a sudden wasting disease that only abated and began to heal once he had called off the siege.

  It didn't seem to matter what clever methods were attempted to circumvent the terms either. To stop unwanted immigration, the president appealed to airlines to stop flights and when that failed the subsequent effort to halt travelers by hiking fees was similarly a failure. Even something as seemingly unconnected as robbing a player who was attempting to reach the tower found the perpetrator suddenly paralyzed, or struck blind and deaf.