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  Too Young to Die

  Pivot Lab Chronicles™ Book One

  Michael Anderle

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © 2020 LMBPN Publishing

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  Cover Art by Jake @ J Caleb Design

  http://jcalebdesign.com / [email protected]

  A Michael Anderle Production

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  First US Edition, June, 2020

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-64202-962-8

  Print ISBN: 978-1-64202-963-5

  The Too Young to Die Team

  Thanks to the Beta Readers

  John Ashmore, Theresa Holmes, Nicole Emens, Larry Omans, Allen Collins

  Thanks to the JIT Readers

  Allen Collins

  Angel LaVey

  Billie Leigh Kellar

  Dave Hicks

  Deb Mader

  Diane L. Smith

  Jeff Eaton

  Jeff Goode

  Kerry Mortimer

  If I’ve missed anyone, please let me know!

  Editor

  The Skyhunter Editing Team

  Contents

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  Creator Notes - Michael Anderle

  Books by Michael Anderle

  Connect with the author

  Part I

  Prologue

  Jacob’s favorite part of MMORPGs by far was that you could be another you. Not someone else entirely because you could never be that, but you could find out who you were if you were dropped into the middle of, say, a fantasy world with a rusty sword and nothing else.

  He liked to think he was the same in either world. A straight talker, he liked to give people the benefit of the doubt until they blew it and once they did, he immediately leapt to conclusions about their character.

  It was why he wasn’t part of the public relations part of the PIVOT team, generally speaking. As Amber liked to say, no part of that cycle was helpful in PR.

  She, meanwhile, took her opportunity in the game world to be a—mostly—more “woohoo” version of herself. In real life, she was five feet two inches of terrifying muscle, with a head of curls that could put Medusa to shame. She had studied engineering with Jacob and Nick at MIT, and she managed to meld creativity and an intuitive grasp of design with one of the most coldly analytical minds Jacob had ever seen.

  Which made her druids both fascinating and pants-pissingly frightening. You never knew if she would preach about the harmony of the natural world, slit someone’s throat…or both.

  Nick, meanwhile, was such a dialed-up version of himself that he was insane. He wanted everyone to love him and poured time into learning the backstory of every NPC. When monsters attacked the group, he felt personally betrayed.

  His two friends had learned a very simple way to deal with this. They let him get as far as he could in terms of winning people over and killed those he had no success with. While they had agreed never to tell him about this strategy, both of them had to admit it was likely he would notice someday. He might be a pathological people-pleaser but he was also quite intelligent.

  They’d deal with that when they came to it.

  Right now, Jacob listened to Amber and Nick argue about the best way forward.

  “No,” she stated, “because the villager said there were dozens of orcs in the hills, and if we stop to talk to all of them, it’ll take us a thousand years to reach the next settlement. And it’s midnight, man. I’m tired.”

  “I won’t talk to all the orcs,” he argued. “I merely thought I’d try to find the leader and talk to him about the attacks on the village.”

  “Okay, but…” Jacob could practically see her rubbing her forehead. “Here’s the thing. It’s late, the orcs will not listen to you, and it would be so much easier to take the side road, log out at the inn, and come back and kill them all tomorrow.”

  “Kill them?” Nick sounded aghast.

  “I’m only jumping ahead,” Amber said grumpily. “It’s where we’ll end up. Jacob, back me up on this one.”

  “Nuh-uh.” He laughed. “I won’t get in the middle of this one.” He typed out a PM to Amber: Remember the rule?

  Yeah, it works, her answer agreed, but it takes so long.

  To be fair, you once said that about a McDonald’s order.

  They had fries already made!

  Jacob laughed but forgot to mute himself, and Nick took this as a condemnation of his strategy.

  “It’s always worth talking to people,” he said grumpily. “Plus, if I resolve five more disputes, I’ll get Diplomat Level Twenty-three.”

  “There it is,” Amber said and sounded grimly amused. “Nick’s a people-pleaser and this game turned it up to eleven because now, he gets little gold stars when he does it.”

  Nick muttered on his end of the voice chat, and Jacob decided to wrangle the two of them. “Let’s go up the mountain path. If it looks like an ambush, we turn and go back to the village behind us. If they immediately want to parlay, we save and come back tomorrow. If it’s smooth sailing, we log out at the next village.”

  The two of them muttered but as he’d expected, they began to walk with him. They even joked about the next day’s lunches. For years, the three of them had lived together and Jacob had only recently moved out. He felt a little pang and could imagine the way the kitchen had smelled while they were cooking.

  It wasn’t something he wanted to spend his time thinking about, though. He liked his new place, and it wasn’t like the three of them didn’t see each other every day at work. They were on the cusp of making their startup’s principal technology workable, and once they had that, investors would pour in to help them fund the rest.

  “The rest” was a game. PIVOT might be founded on virtual reality and reading brain waves, but all that scanning technology wouldn’t do jack if they didn’t create themselves a world. All three of them had worked on PIVOT, in fact, in order to make their dreams of truly living in a game world come true.

  The problem was, while a crack team of three MIT-trained engineers could absolutely build a prototype of an immersive VR experience given several years and some funding, it turned out that a team of three could not make a sprawling, immersive MMORPG. There was simply too much to do.

  This game, for instance, had made incredible waves when it came out—its AI and voice recognition software were top-notch, and the sheer depth of each of the quests was breathtaking. Instead of being stuck on one questline or having to choose between a few dialogue options, you could approach problems in your own way—it was why Nick could try to talk it out with the orcs or Amber could simply go in with fireballs.

  The PIVOT team needed to make a game that could rival some of the best games out there, and they needed to not do what Forever Echo had done and piss off a number of big industry players. The second one, as far as Jacob could tell, wouldn’t be a problem because they had no way to accomplish the first.

  They needed to find solutions for that one.


  He kept his character moving and took the time to appreciate how twilight looked in this zone. After a magical explosion of some kind, the area was bathed in drifting fallout—gorgeous, like embers on the wind, but also dangerous if you were touched by too many. The village behind them had tall walls and, even in the middle-ages aesthetic, an abundance of pseudo-greenhouses kept vegetables safe.

  When Jacob moved around the bend in the road, however, he stopped in confusion.

  “Guys.”

  The conversation on the voice chat stopped and the other two took the corner at a sprint.

  “Orcs?” Amber had her staff out.

  “No, look at the sign.” Jacob started his character forward again and the three of them crowded around the sign and clicked it.

  DEAR PLAYER-

  THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME IN OUR WORLD. UNFORTUNATELY, WE CAN NO LONGER AFFORD TO KEEP MAKING THIS GAME. WE ARE GLAD TO HAVE SHARED THIS MUCH OF OUR WORLD WITH YOU AND HOPE YOU HAVE ENJOYED YOUR TIME. PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ENJOY EXISTING COPIES OF THE GAME, BUT OUR MULTIPLAYER SERVERS WILL SHUT DOWN ON JANUARY 31.

  SINCERELY, THE FOREVER ECHO TEAM

  “Wait.” Amber sounded lost. “The game’s shutting down?”

  “The game can’t shut down,” Nick said. “So many people love it.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Nick, not everyone is motivated only by that. It says they can’t afford to keep going.” She sighed regretfully. “I knew their subscription numbers weren’t good but damn—I’m gonna miss this one, guys. This sucks. It sucks so hard.”

  Jacob turned to look over the valley behind them. The game was one of the most amazing he’d played in a long while. It had an immersive feel to it, real enough to hook you in but unreal enough to be an entirely new world.

  Then, something occurred to him. “Wait.” His brain had shifted into overdrive. “Wait. Wait, wait, wait.”

  “Wait, wait, wait?” Amber said.

  “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait…” Nick chanted now. “Wait! Wait!” He laughed when Amber joined in.

  “I’m trying to think and you’re not making it easy!” Jacob called over the sound of their chanting. He pushed his headset off his ears and lowered his head into his hands. Yes. This could be workable—it could be very workable.

  He put his earphones on and grimaced when he heard the other two still chanting.

  “Hey, listen here, kiddos.” He flicked the microphone a few times. “I have an idea. It means we don’t have to stop playing this game.”

  “We hide their servers so they can’t shut them off,” Amber said. “Excellent. I like it.”

  “Or,” Jacob said, drawing the word out, “we buy them.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, kiddo, we’re broker than broke right now. We can’t simply buy games for—ohhhh.” Amber caught up. “Oh, that could work.”

  “Look, I haven’t slept in a while,” Nick interjected, “so I want to make sure I’m parsing this correctly. You two want to buy this game…and start some kind of paid, worldwide Thunderdome thing, right?”

  Jacob guffawed. “I’m not crazy, right? We could do this. Adapting an existing game to VR has to be easier than building an entire game. They have all the assets in place, the story…we could do this.”

  “We could do this,” his friends confirmed in unison.

  “Okay, it’s past midnight. Let’s all go to bed and if it still sounds like a good idea in the morning, we’ll buy it.”

  A growl behind them interrupted their plans.

  “Goddammit, Jacob,” Amber said, “this is why you don’t have long conversations in orc-infested territory. All right, everyone. Let’s murder some orcs.”

  “No!” Nick pounded on his desk. “We talk to them—”

  A fireball streaked toward them.

  “I think talking time is over, buddy,” Jacob told him. “For the forest! For the villagers! For glory!”

  Chapter One

  Nick’s smoothie, which had seemed like a good idea when he ordered the box of mixes delivered to his house, had now begun to separate into two distinct and equally unappealing sections at the bottom of his Nalgene bottle. For some reason, he couldn’t stop watching it.

  With a sigh, Amber picked it up and lobbed it at the sink. It missed and bounced off the floor on the other side of the counter. After she’d stared at it for a moment, she shrugged as if to say, “Good enough”, and looked at him.

  “Can we focus now?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” He slouched in his chair. “Will you keep saying depressing things?”

  “If by ‘depressing things’ you mean the numbers in our financial reports, then yes.” She gave him a smile that showed her teeth. “Let me put it this way, Mr. Ryan. Neither of us will leave this office until we have a plan in place.”

  “That’s not fair,” Nick complained. “Jacob doesn’t have to be here. Why do I?” He picked at his sleeve. “Lucky bastard, having his grandmother in the ICU.”

  Amber’s kick, when it came, was direct and to a particularly sensitive part of his shin. She jabbed a finger at him. “You never say things like that,” she told him severely.

  He nodded, chastened. Put her in front of a problem and she would do whatever it took to solve it. It was one of the things that made her an incredible engineer—and one of the reasons he hoped she would never decide to take up politics. Or a military career.

  Nick shuddered. The thought of Amber in charge of high-grade explosives was terrifying.

  But as utilitarian and cold-eyed as she could be about problem-solving, she had no tolerance for black humor. Make a joke she thought was tempting fate or mocking someone’s pain, and she’d let you know about it immediately.

  You knew you’d really messed up when she devolved into Spanish. Once, he and Jacob had secretly recorded one of her rants and translated it later—a lengthy process due to the fact that popular translation dictionaries didn’t have quite as varied a vocabulary as their friend. The results had convinced them both to never get on her bad side.

  Now, Nick cleared his throat, leaned forward on the table, and paused briefly when the rusted metal legs creaked. They’d retired to the kitchenette part of the offices for a working lunch, which hadn’t exactly worked out. Amber had forgotten to order food and his food…

  Well, whatever that was, you couldn’t call it food. His stomach rumbled and he grimaced.

  “It’s not so bad,” he said after he’d stared at the numbers for a few more minutes. “I mean…it’s not much worse than last quarter.”

  Her sigh was less angry than despairing. “But it is worse,” she said. She sat with her head tipped back and stared at the ceiling. “We made a thing that…” Her voice trailed off and she sighed again.

  Nick cleared his throat awkwardly. The numbers hadn’t been great for a while now, but he hadn’t realized she was this worried about it. He’d watched things work out for them, over and over, from the early technological hurdles to the Hail Mary presentations they’d given time and again to investors.

  Something always came through. This was Silicon Valley. Money was nothing and there was always someone willing to pay for the latest cool thing.

  Now, he tried to reassure her. “Amber.” He leaned back and waited until she opened her eyes and looked at him. “Things come through. They always come through. We’ll think of something.”

  “I don’t want to think of something,” she said, her tone crisp. “I don’t want to patch this until it’s two months from now and we’re looking at another quarterly loss, and we’re deeper in the red.”

  “By then, we’ll have plenty of interest.” He saw her face harden and held a hand up. “No, no, I don’t think you’re giving this enough credit. Let me get the—”

  “Nick—”

  “The articles!” he called over his shoulder. His mother had printed them and sent them to him, although he’d rolled his eyes at them when he opened the envelope. Now, however, they would make a good case
to show Amber.

  He dodged around the glass-walled laboratory. One of the pods was open and looked rather like a cross between an iPod, a spa bed, and a tanning booth, and another two hummed faintly as they processed information. Their operating systems were updating with the latest story components for the MMORPG, and the LED panels around the side flashed orange as they did so.

  Nearby, a sterilized compartment held the headset hookups and a veritable wealth of heart rate monitors, blood pressure cuffs, and thermometers were piled in a basket in the corner.

  “Nick,” Amber said again, as he returned to the room. She had rolled the sleeves of her Henley up and pulled her hair into a ponytail. “The problem isn’t—”

  “‘PIVOT unveils the first look at its groundbreaking virtual reality pods,’” he quoted with a flourish. He propped one foot on his folding chair and leaned forward, really hamming it up. “Listen to this. ‘One of the most popular booths by far at E3 this year was PIVOT, who gave live demos of what they simply call pods. These come preprogrammed with a surprisingly gripping MMORPG called Alt IRL, which—'”

  She stretched impatiently and twitched the printout out of his hand. Without breaking eye contact, she flipped to the second page of the review, paused for a moment to find the section she was looking for, and read aloud. “‘While the Kickstarter campaign raised four hundred and thirty-eight percent of its goal, early prototypes of the pod, priced at seven thousand dollars apiece, have not found a significant market.” She tossed the sheet of paper onto the table and fixed him with a steady look. “The problem isn’t the interest. Nick, people can’t afford it.”