Page 37 of Control

“And there is the core of the problem!” Ronnie said while raising his arms as if he were a church pastor hearing the voice of God. I turned around to face him again. “You just nailed the biggest problem right on the head! You tell us not to feel that you’re better than we are, yet you walk around this world with your nose in the air acting like you’re some gift to it! Like you’re the next coming of Christ! Are you fucking kidding me?” I could tell Ronnie was getting angry and my goal of getting him and some of those around the room unsettled had worked. All I needed to do was try and redirect him back to the reason for my visit to see if I could squeeze any information out of anyone.

“Who did the hack,” I said to Ronnie with a forcefulness in my voice even I didn’t know I was capable of.

“Go fuck yourself,” he said, his anger piquing.

“Who did the god damn hack!” I screamed, surprising most of the people in the room. Not a single time I had raised my voice to anyone quite like that in all my time in Aurora. I knew I had to go for broke or this wouldn’t work. “If that data gets out, you’re screwed just like the rest of us!” Ronnie snickered for a moment before giving me a sinister smile. His eyes peered into me as if mentally drilling a hole into my forehead.

“You’ll never find out,” he said with an evil and horrible voice. “You try to come here to my turf and tell me what to do? You god damn bitch! You act like you’re being so noble, yet all you’re doing is trying to save yourself! You know what will happened when that data gets released. You know you’re gonna be the one who’s hit the hardest so of course you come here looking for answers. I’m sorry sweetheart, but you’re not getting any help from me or from anyone else here.” Ronnie stepped a little closer to me. “We’re all gonna know who you are. We’re all gonna laugh when we see you’re really just some old, fat, bald guy living with his geriatric parents home who comes here and poses as a woman to get money out of people. You’re scared because you know once that info leaks, you’re through! No more ‘Ana’ after that! Oh, you’re fucked. You’re so fucked and you know it!” With that rant, I had my answer.

“You know,” I said, lowering my voice and looking him in the eyes. “You know who did it. You know who did it and you’re fine with setting this place on fire just appease your own personal agenda. You’re willing to expose everyone here…and for what?”

“You!” Ronnie shot back at me, his voice also lowering and coming across far more sinister than before. “I don’t give a shit about anyone else here. I don’t even care about myself. I just want you! I want the whole world to know that they all got played and you’re just a fucking phony piece of shit that they somehow came to worship. You and your fucking ‘council’ of nobodies are all fakes and I want to see you squirm like the worms that you all are and if that means I have to set the world on fire, so be it!”

It was Ronnie! Ronnie was the hacker…wasn’t he?

“Ronnie?” I said, somewhat taken aback by his apparent admission. “You? You did the hack?” The crowd was dead silent and my HUD began to light up with messages and a couple of incoming voice calls - one from Cris and the other from Reyna. I ignored them both as well as the messages to stay focused on Ronnie.

“I wish,” he said. “As much as I’d like to say I did it, I can’t take credit for it. I’m just glad it happened.”

“Then who!” I said, raising my voice to the point of causing an echo in the room.

“I did,” said a voice from the back of the crowd. Everyone, including me, turned to look for a face to match to it. Stepping through the crowd emerged someone I’d only met a single time in my time in Aurora. I’d met him when the game moved from Beta to Live and we’d only spoken for about 15 minutes. I’d seen him around the game in various rooms and while we never spoke after our initial meeting, we did exchange glances and head nods of acknowledgment. Setting eyes on him as he moved through the crowd sent a shiver down my spine for some reason. The look on his face as he moved toward me was nothing short of terrifying. He was expressionless and his eyes were dead, as if he had lost his soul long ago.

“You,” I said in a near whisper as he continued stepping toward me. “I know you. I remember.”

“Do you,” he said to me in a monotone voice. I recognized his face, but I remembered his name being different. I thought I was misremembering. “You know my face, but this name isn’t what you remember. I’m right, aren’t I. Do you remember the name…Four Buttons?” It was such an odd and peculiar name that I could never forget it. As soon as he said it, I knew my memory wasn’t wrong. It was the man I remembered meeting and seeing from time to time for a period when the game was still new. His new name, Elecshun, was one I’d not seen before.

“Yes,” I said, confused and unsure of what was really happening in that moment. “You did this?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice even and undisturbed as if it were coming from a robot. “I know even admitting it will get me banned soon enough, but I don’t care. I can just get another account set up, change up my hardware ID and I’m all good to go.” His eerie and haunting voice gave me chills and I felt the urge to get away from him but I stood strong, not wanting to appear weak.

“But why?” I asked. “Why do….”

“And I did it,” another voice called out from beyond the crowd once more. I looked over and in the direction of the voice and could tell who it was that had spoken up.

“Me too!” said yet another voice. “I did it.” More and more voices began to speak up, all claiming to have been the one that was responsible for the hack. I looked over to each face, thinking it was them that had spoken, but all of them stared back at me with blank and unmoving expressions. Before I knew it, all of them were saying the same thing over and over: I did it! I did it!

I felt the room begin to spin as each new voice caused me to turn my head, over and over. I could feel myself getting overwhelmed, but I managed to maintain my facade of calm confidence. I forced myself to look into the eyes of each person whose face I managed to spot as they spoke up. I managed to see a small opening and noticed another smaller group of players further back in the room away from the stage. They didn’t appear to be part of the trolls and were just quietly keeping an eye on what was transpiring. With each second, more people joined that second group and before I turned back to face Ronnie once more, that group had swelled to what I thought must have been several hundred people.

“Do you really think we’d just tell you?” Ronnie said to me, my eyes meeting his. His voice on the brink of laughter. He stepped to me again, this time getting as close as he’d ever been to me. Out of instinct, I turned on my Escort application in my HUD and adjusted my strength stat, something I would sometimes do if I were with a new client and didn’t want to give them a chance to overpower me should something go sideways. I set it to it’s maximum value of 350%.

“You’re a monster,” I said to Ronnie as I gritted my teeth. “This is why no one wants anything to do with you and others like you! All you do is talk about how you’re the victim and how people like me are somehow to blame for all your shortcomings!”

“Because you are!” he screamed at me, our faces maybe a foot apart. I could feel his hot breath, stinking of beer and cigarettes, right up on me. “You were handed the keys to the castle while the rest of us got nothing! You were given some bullshit position of authority while the rest of us had no say in it! What gives you the right to tell any off us what to do or how to feel! You don’t get to do that to me or to us! The developers decided to play King Maker and just like that we have some fucking council to tell us all what to do? You’re a false prophet and I hope you fucking burn! You deserve none of what you have!”

“I never wanted any of this!” I screamed back to him as my guise of confidence finally fell away. The emotional toll of his words had finally broken through and my charade of a confident and headstrong individual gave way and all that was left was a tearful and scared woman who was barely hanging on. “I never…wanted this!” The crowd hushed once more as I spoke, the look on Ronnie’s face turning from rage into a sort of distorted pleasure. “I just…it just happened one day and I never….” I couldn’t finish my words. I broke eye contact with Ronnie and looked down to the gray concrete floor. The deafening silence was all that was present aside from the hard breathing coming from Ronnie who felt as if he were almost on top of me. I could feel myself breaking.

“And there we have it,” Ronnie said, backing away from me and looking back over the crowd and raising his voice so they could all hear him again. “There we have it, boys! You saw it here first. This is the result of all our hard work. This is our prize!” I felt the tears falling from my eyes once again. I couldn’t look up. All I could hear was the crowd jeering me again as well as what sounded like a faint series of foots steps coming toward me from behind. “That’s right! You see what just happened here?” I felt Ronnie step closer to me once more. “You like that, your majesty? Pawn…takes…queen.”

My hands began to shake and my vision began to fail me. The jeering was all I could hear and the smell of Ronnie’s rancid breath enveloped me. I began to question why I ever thought this would work. Why did I feel this need to try and do something so reckless, knowing the chances of it working were so low? What made me think I had the strength to pull this off?

“We’re too much for you,” Ronnie said to me, his voice boisterous and obnoxious. “You really think we couldn’t see through your whole charade? We sidestep shit like this all the time. Dodging your attempt was like shooing away a kitten.” Just then, the foot steps I’d been hearing stopped just behind me and a confidence and powerful voice came forth.

“Dodge this!” said the voice as it moved past me. I looked up in time to see a beer bottle come crashing down on Ronnie’s head and a glob of foamy liquid go flying. Recoiling from the blow, Ronnie fell to the concrete and writhed in pain, his hands instinctively covering his head. Turning to my right I finally got to see who it was that had stepped in to force him back from me. It was Reyna.

“You bitch!” Ronnie yelled out as he sat on the floor, beer all over his face and dripping down to his shirt and into his lap. Reyna stood above him, her hands on her hips and her face filled with rage. I’d never seen her make that face before. “You fucking bitch!” Reaching back and grasping for my hand, Reyna kept her focus on Ronnie.

“Check yourself, motherfucker!” she said to him. I’d never heard her speak like this in our time together. Like me, she was a girl from the ‘old neighborhood’ so to speak. She grew up with the constant threat of danger from hoodlums and gang members and learned how to survive it all. While I’d never heard her speak in such a way to anyone since we’d met, it made complete sense to me that that little ‘hood’ girl was still a part of her.

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