PROLOGUE
Bugz felt alone as she stared into the abyss. In this case staring into the abyss meant scanning an armada of enemy Clan:LESS starships that stretched as far as her eyes could see. Their numbers were without end. She was flying solo. Still, she liked her odds. As Bugz floated weightlessly in the darkness of space her peripheral vision sparkled with brilliant stars, some occasionally hidden by her long black hair swaying in zero gravity. She was dressed in the way that millions of online followers had come to expect from her: a sleek black spacesuit carved with neon-pink and Day-Glo-green floral patterns. Bugz—the myth, the legend, the ruler of the Floraverse—was ready to go to war once more against her mortal enemies.
The ships at the front of the Clan:LESS fleet inched closer to Bugz, clearly waiting for a signal to attack. Though huge in numbers, this squad had a ragtag appearance. Some of the ships looked like military fighter jets; others she recognized from famous sci-fi sagas she’d streamed. As she searched their ranks, she even saw one that resembled the rickety old plane the Wright brothers had first flown on Earth so many years ago, the pilot exposed to the nearly absolute-zero temperature of space with only a pair of goggles and a leather cap to protect him. This was only possible because this particular showdown was taking place in the online world of the ’Verse—the Spirit World, to be specific. While the Floraverse had an augmented reality mode, or AR, which allowed players to experience the game as a layer over top of their real-world everyday locations, the Spirit World was a fully virtual realm where almost anything was possible—including a pilot like this one surviving in the vacuum of space.
Farther back in the crowd, Bugz could see massive ships shaped like pyramids and cubes, and even one that resembled a metallic moon complete with artificial crater. Bugz chuckled to herself as she ticked off the movies and series in which she’d seen each of these larger craft.
Well, Bugz thought, Clan:LESS never claimed to be creative.
As formulaic as these larger, distant ships may have been in design, they were still dangerous in practice. Any one of them could destroy Bugz. She swiped open a magnification window
and watched these craft empty their guts of thousands of smaller attack ships, which joined the torrent flooding toward her. She reached for the computer on her wrist and hacked into the Clan:LESS voice-com channel. Through the vulgar babble of sexist and anti-Indigenous comments came a voice that Bugz could never forget.
“Alright, men,” the voice announced, pausing to allow the chatter on the line to die down. “Activate your weapons and get ready to attack on the count of three…”
Alpha. It was all Bugz could do to stifle the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Alpha and his Clan:LESS followers had taken everything from Bugz in the ’Verse, including her favorite creation: the underwater serpent Mishi-pizhiw. They’d even come to her Rez in the real world and desecrated an ancient sacred site of the Anishinaabe people. Bugz breathed deeply and exhaled. She decided that the best response to Alpha and Clan:LESS in this instance, a moment in which they believed their pending attack would be intimidating, would be humor. And perhaps to cause a little mischief.
“Wait,” Bugz shouted into the voice-com channel, cutting Alpha off even as he began to count. “Do you mean, like, attack on three? Or do you mean one, two, three, and then attack?”
Bugz’s trolling had an instant effect. She could see the pilots of the starships closest to her scrunching their foreheads in confusion. The centurion flying the lead spacecraft raised a hand to his ear piece as though awaiting urgent clarification to this important question. A bodybuilder in a Clan:LESS fighter jet looked over to the ship to his right, searching for advice, then to his left.
Bugz tossed her head back and laughed as hard as she could, her cackle audible only to herself, the rest of her laugh lost forever in the abyss of space. Messing with Clan:LESS never got old, no matter how outmatched she was in a showdown.
“You idiots!” Alpha shouted over the voice channel. “It doesn’t matter. Just attack!”
The bodybuilder and the centurion made eye contact, still unsure of what to do.
Alpha screamed “ATTACK!”
At this, thousands of Clan:LESS ships surged across Bugz’s field of view. They began charging their weapons systems, banking off into complicated flight patterns, and, in a few instances, crashing into each other.
Bugz fired up her jetpack and shot straight up from her original position at a breakneck speed. She leaned forward to bank her flight path over top of the Clan:LESS horde, who kept
flying together across a relatively horizontal plane. As Bugz flew overhead, she had her pick of which craft to strike with her laser gun. A star fighter here. A stealth bomber there. The Wright brothers plane thrown in for good measure. She struck them down and the gamertags of their pilots rose slowly from their wreckages.
“zzTie_Fighterzz has been eliminated by Bugz.”
“You2andEuropaToo has been eliminated by Bugz.”
“WrightStuff has been eliminated by Bugz.”
From the rear of the Clan:LESS formation, a long column of star fighters peeled off from the squad and arced up toward Bugz, firing lasers at her along the way. As they closed in on her position, their barrage grew more and more accurate until some shots crashed into Bugz’s suit and forced her to change course. She could take only so much of this fire.
Bugz banked off in a curved flight path back toward the horde, who now appeared above her. She moved her arms down to her sides, which made her look like an eagle diving for her prey. As she hurtled toward the mass of Clan:LESS ships, the elite fighters on her tail proved dangerous to their own clanmates. With every shot they took at Bugz and missed—and there were many of these stray laser beams—they destroyed one of their own. Dozens of gamertags rose from the wreckage before Alpha shouted over the voice channel for the elite star fighters to stop the friendly fire.
Bugz punched through the sea of Clan:LESS ships like a diver into water, the wake from her jetpack tracing a path behind her for her enemies to follow. The light from a nearby star flared on Bugz’s visor and lit her up in a brilliant purple hue. The scene was one of pure beauty, prompting Bugz to take a screenshot—until, of course, she cleared the ships and the firing resumed.
From here, the discipline of the Clan:LESS ranks broke down.
Bugz charted a course like a pinball through the growing asteroid field of high-tech Clan:LESS wreckage. It took all of her focus to stay clear of the two Clan:LESS ships colliding in front of her while keeping an eye on the fighter firing at her from her six. Along the way, she dished out a few laser blasts at a craft pulling up beside her. The barrage of laser fire, exploding ships, and chaos illuminated everything around her. The heat, light, and danger were all closing in. Bugz gritted her teeth, braced for impact, and desperately scanned her surroundings for an opening. Looking behind herself, down, and to the left, she saw it—a small patch of darkness—an escape route.
Bugz swiveled across three dimensions and cranked her jetpack to full speed.
She shot out of the chaos, away from the horde, and into the soothing emptiness of the universe. After a breath, she throttled back on the jetpack and turned to see how close the Clan:LESS horde was. They were giving chase, but she still had at least another moment before she needed to engage them again. The distant Clan:LESS fighters poured into a large formation like grains of sand streaming through the center of an hour glass, intending to overwhelm her with one immense, direct barrage.
Bugz locked and loaded a second laser cannon in her left hand to complement the one in her right. She raised her guns and angled the open sights toward the coming Armageddon.
Before doomsday could arrive, however, something bizarre happened to the Clan:LESS armada. Ships began spinning off from the flank of the immense crowd as though they were toys being thrown out of a toy box by a rowdy toddler. The disturbance made its way to the front of the formation with shocking speed—whatever was causing this chaos was closing in on the lead ship, and fast.
Bugz exhaled sharply and readied her weapons. The lead Clan:LESS ship exploded in a shower of blue, red, and purple sparks, its hull splitting right down the middle. Bugz pulled back on each trigger slowly, a hair’s width away from unleashing overwhelming laser fire on whatever was about to emerge as the source of the devastation before her.
It registered with Bugz in an instant that whatever was behind this mess was of immense power—enough power to rampage through the Clan:LESS horde in a way that even she hadn’t been able to. It occurred to Bugz that she might be about to meet her match.
As the explosion parted, a humanoid figure wrapped in a sleek black spacesuit shot through the wreckage like a bullet. It grabbed Bugz by her shoulders and flew the two of them away from the remains of Clan:LESS; they traveled at a speed so high that the light from distant stars dragged behind them, creating a shower of shooting stars.
Light speed, she thought to herself. She wondered whether the physics of the ’Verse were accurate in this respect. Whoever this was had clearly leveled up in a way that Bugz could barely comprehend.
As Bugz glanced at the arms of this stranger dragging her through space at an explanation-defying speed, she caught sight of neon-pink and Day-Glo-green floral designs running up the length of their arms and legs. These were Bugz’s signature designs—everyone in the ’Verse knew that.
Anxiety sparked across Bugz’s spirit and overtook her awareness.
She reached out and pulled the black visor off the stranger’s head. Instantly, she gasped: she was staring at a mirror image of herself. The stranger-Bugz looked away, studying the battle they’d left behind. Bugz noticed that the stranger’s hair was shorter than her own. Why would I cut my hair?
The stranger-Bugz finally looked up and met Bugz’s gaze. Staring into her doppelgänger’s eyes, the real Bugz froze—she entered a moment of pure and infinite calm.
The calm was shattered a heartbeat later as Bugz recognized the most significant difference between her and the stranger. The left side of the stranger-Bugz’s face, the side that had initially been concealed as she looked back at the battle, was contorted into a grotesque snarl, reminiscent of a demon hound or the most hideous monster from the darkest horror movie Bugz had ever seen…
Bugz shot straight up in her bed, her room still dark.
It had all been a dream—the battle, the chase, her own gruesome twin.
And yet, while Bugz had awakened from one bad dream, she knew she still remained locked in a nightmare.
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