Wild Massive

by Scotto Moore

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure

Synopsis

Scotto Moore's Wild Massive is a glorious web of lies, secrets, and humor in a breakneck nitrous-boosted saga of the small rejecting the will of the mighty.
Welcome to the Building, an infinitely tall skyscraper in the center of the multiverse, where any floor could contain a sprawling desert oasis, a cyanide rain forest, or an entire world.
Carissa loves her elevator. Up and down she goes, content with the sometimes chewy food her reality fabricator spits out, as long as it means she doesn’t have to speak to another living person.
But when a mysterious shapeshifter from an ambiguous world lands on top of her elevator, intent on stopping a plot to annihilate hundreds of floors, Carissa finds herself stepping out of her comfort zone. She is forced to flee into the Wild Massive network of theme parks in the Building, where
technology, sorcery, and elaborate media tie-ins combine to form impossible ride experiences, where every guest is a VIP, the roller coasters are frequently safe, and if you don’t have a valid day pass, the automated defense lasers will escort you from being alive.

Release date: February 7, 2023

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 496

Sample

EPISODE 1.01

Carissa awoke to the sound of something landing hard on the elevator in which she lived. The elevator was in a slow climb at the time of impact.

“What the hell was that?” she said, removing her headphones, glancing upward at the ceiling, seeing nothing out of the ordinary. The lighting panels were still intact, currently in the shade of twilight blue that Carissa liked when she was sleeping. For safety reasons, the elevator’s cloudlet preferred not to dim the lights into complete darkness.

“A solid mass, approximately one hundred and two kilograms, landed at high speed on the roof,” the cloudlet replied.

“Full stop,” she said, and the cloudlet complied by gently decelerating the elevator to a halt. “How far away is the nearest safe floor?”

“Twenty-seven thousand, four hundred and eight floors below us,” said the cloudlet.

---

She slipped into her mechanic’s overalls and said, “What do you think it is?”

“I think it’s alive,” the cloudlet said.

“That seems unlikely,” she replied.

“The event does seem to violate several safety protocols,” the cloudlet agreed. “But its weight has shifted slightly since it landed.”

“Did it land on the hatch?” she asked.

“The hatch is clear. It landed near the exterior wall of the elevator shaft.”

The last time Carissa had occasion to go outside the elevator in between floors was during a safety drill she ran with her cloudlet when they were getting to know each other, right after she moved into this elevator; would’ve been maybe a decade ago if she remembered correctly.

She checked her supply of first aid pills—she still had half a pouch full. She stuffed the pouch in one of the many pockets of her overalls. Out of habit, she slipped a slim handheld tablet into another pocket.

Bringing a hundred-kilo mass of “I think it’s alive” into her elevator didn’t sound super appealing. But you couldn’t just leave “I think it’s alive” on the roof, either. You always had to help people in this ridiculous place.

She wrapped a belt around her overalls, clipped a pistol and a knife to it. She put on a sleek helmet with an embedded headlamp and slipped its tiny oxygen-supply mask over her nose. If she was up there longer than five minutes, she’d need to drop back down for proper air.

“Let’s talk through this,” she said. “What’s on that safe floor?”

“Wild Massive Super is the main attraction,” the cloudlet replied. “We would not open in a mapped location.”

So if Carissa’s elevator opened its doors on that floor, it might come as a complete surprise to anyone in the vicinity. It might open its doors in the middle of a room, or in a garbage dump, or in a parking lot. It might be witnessed by dozens or hundreds; it might go unnoticed completely. Since it was an unmapped location, no one would be waiting to board the elevator, but many might recognize the significance of a Building elevator appearing suddenly in their midst. Attention might be paid; shrines might be built; Carissa might be highly annoyed.

But Wild Massive Super was the flagship theme park in the Wild Massive empire and would almost certainly have proper medical, if for some reason her first aid pills failed to do the trick. Hopefully, “I think it’s alive” could pay to get in.

“Open the ceiling hatch for me,” Carissa said. “I want to go out and see what we’ve got up there.”

A center panel in the ceiling slid open smoothly, revealing the pure darkness of the shaft.

---

She’d forgotten how cold it was out here. She almost dropped back down and got herself a jacket, but nah.

As a rule, you could find yourself in the elevator shaft for a couple of different reasons.

Reason one was maintenance, although the elevators were generally self-repairing and you could do most routine maintenance from inside the car, anyway.

Reason two was that you were fucked in some major way, which she hadn’t experienced herself, but you heard stories if you lived this life long enough.

Crumpled on one corner of the roof was a large figure, humanoid at first glance. By her estimation, this figure probably qualified as fucked in some major way.

As she watched, however, the figure seemed to melt and re-form over and over, slowly cycling through possible forms, humanoid or otherwise. It was striking and weird and grotesque to watch.

“I’m going to help you,” she said as she inched toward it.

“I’m skeptical,” the thing said. It sounded like it was trying to speak while being smashed flat, as though its lungs were out of whack.

“I’m serious,” she said. “I brought first aid pills. Do those work on you?”

“Sure do,” the thing croaked.

“Where’s your mouth?” she asked. Her headlamp hadn’t successfully pinned down a face on this globular ball of mutating flesh yet.

A slithery tentacle—maybe blue, maybe green—emerged and flopped down in front of her. She reached out and dropped a pill onto it; the pill was promptly absorbed into its flesh. It suddenly seemed to gain control of its transformations with a burst of energy, and moments later, Carissa watched it resolve into the figure of a human, like herself, with pale white skin and an unnaturally thin frame; its age group and gender indeterminate.

“Taking a human form just to make me comfortable?” Carissa asked.

“Taking a human form because it’s one of three I can easily manage at the moment,” the shapeshifter said, sounding exhausted. “The other two would be … less friendly.”

“Can you move?” Carissa asked.

“Maybe. Do you have any more pills?”

She fished out another one, this time placing it into the shapeshifter’s palm. Ze consumed it quickly, and moments later, ze was able to sit up on zir own.

“Thank you,” ze said.

“After you,” she replied, motioning toward the hatch. Ze crawled forward, swung zir newly formed legs down, and made the drop. She swung down after zir, and the hatch closed snugly above her head.

---

The shapeshifter huddled under a blanket on Carissa’s sleeping pad, and she offered zir another first aid pill. Ze took it without hesitation. They didn’t speak for a while, until ze stopped shivering and seemed to finally relax. A comforting hum in the background indicated the elevator was moving again.

“Only shapeshifters I know of,” Carissa said slowly, “are Shai-Manak.” She paused, giving zir an opportunity to respond, and when ze didn’t, she pressed, “Are you Shai-Manak?”

“Yes,” ze said with a big sigh, “I’m Shai-Manak.”

“Do you mind my asking—how did you wind up on the roof of my elevator?”

“Yours, huh?” Ze nodded zir approval, then said, “I jumped into the elevator shaft. Look, you can just let me off at the next convenient floor and pretend you never saw me.”

Something heavy landed hard on the roof of the elevator. Moments later, another heavy thing landed hard right next to the first heavy thing.

A series of resounding slams—punches, really—began striking the roof of the elevator, creating loud booms inside.

“More Shai-Manak?” she asked.

“Yes,” the shapeshifter said. “Enforcers.”

“Cloudlet, reverse direction, please. Hop us to the next station with zero population at least a thousand floors up,” Carissa ordered. “Authorized passengers only.”

“Understood,” the cloudlet replied.

A small flash let them know that the elevator had teleported a significant distance up the elevator shaft. The resounding thuds on the roof were gone; the “enforcers” that had landed on top of the elevator were not authorized passengers and therefore had not been included in the elevator’s teleport radius. They were now plummeting down the elevator shaft at least a thousand floors below them.

“Should I feel guilty about that?” she thought to ask.

“Not overly,” the shapeshifter said.

“Doors are opening,” the cloudlet said.

“Shit,” Carissa said, drawing her pistol.

A pleasant ding sounded, and then the doors opened.

---

You could ride the elevators in the Building up and down all you wanted, or you could ask them to teleport you to the nearest anchor station instead. The range wasn’t bad; an elevator’s onboard teleport pad could power a hop of around ten thousand floors on its own, and a relay network extended that range. The relay network was spotty this far above Association floors, though, where anchor stations were irregularly placed and unpredictably defended.

Only one thing about teleporting an elevator in this fashion was truly reliable: the doors always opened when the elevator reached an anchor station.

Oh, how she hated that simple cause-and-effect mechanism. Oh, how she’d begged and pleaded with her cloudlet to reconsider this truism about its fundamental design. Oh, how she’d searched high and low for engineering specifications that could guide her in disabling automatic door opening altogether, but to no avail.

If you asked an elevator to teleport to an anchor station, it was happy to oblige, but nothing short of a godlike intervention could stop the doors from opening at the end of that hop.

The doors opened onto a large bamboo platform with a thatched canopy, perched in the branches of giant trees in a tropical forest. The canopy protected the platform from the heavy rain that poured down in a torrent from the sky above the forest.

No one happened to be waiting for the elevator just then. “Is this a safe floor?” she asked.

“The atmosphere is poisonous to both of you,” the cloudlet replied. You were always safe inside the bubble of atmosphere in a given elevator, but step outside the car at your own peril. Sure, the cloudlets always tried to give you solid advice, but they couldn’t physically stop you from walking out into a cyanide rain forest if that was your goal.

She jabbed the Close Doors button—a single, sharp, professional jab—and the doors calmly slid shut a moment later. She clipped her pistol back onto her belt.

“Zero population—are you hiding from someone?” the shapeshifter asked her.

“Nah,” she said, “I’m just antisocial.”

“Destination?” the cloudlet asked.

She peered at the shapeshifter and said, “Can we take you somewhere specific?”

“Nearest safe floor is fine,” the shapeshifter replied.

“There’s a theme park on that floor,” Carissa said.

“Lovely,” said the shapeshifter. “I do enjoy themes.”

“Cloudlet, take us down to the Wild Massive flagship,” Carissa said, “and let’s try not to rush.”

“Gently descending,” replied the cloudlet. In theory, the elevator was expected to answer calls along the route, but the cloudlet had come to appreciate that Carissa was a one-of-a-kind passenger, and it made allowances for her moods and habits more than the average elevator would. They rarely saw other passengers.

“Thank you for coming to my aid,” the shapeshifter said. Ze had been nude when ze first dropped into the elevator, but now ze seemed to be constructing clothing for zirself, style yet to be determined, zir skin rippling this way and that. “I don’t suppose you have tea? I could use something warm to ease the chill.”

Carissa nodded, took a few steps across the elevator to the wall opposite the doors, where she’d bolted a tiny makeshift kitchenette into place: small organics fabricator for staple foods, a cold storage unit for the few unique treats she liked to acquire as she traveled. A single mug hung on a hook.

“Did you expect to survive jumping into an open elevator shaft?” Carissa asked as she stuck her mug in the fabricator and watched it fill with a nondescript tea that would probably be palatable.

“The move was improvisational, I’ll admit,” the shapeshifter replied. “I can’t say I gave myself time to consider the odds of survival.”

“How’d you get the doors open in the first place?” Elevator doors were notoriously difficult to open without a car waiting, which seemed like a good and proper design, especially given the events of the last ten minutes.

The shapeshifter smiled grimly and said, “Trade secret.” Fair enough. The elevators had ears, after all.

After a few moments, the shapeshifter’s clothes had finally settled into place, providing a nondescript working-class look, like a mechanic on a day off maybe—perhaps taking cues from Carissa’s attire. Transformation complete, the shapeshifter let Carissa’s blanket drop to the sleeping mat but remained seated with zir back to the wall. Ze had chosen a human form, but Carissa couldn’t shake unsettling images of zir transformation from her mind and remained on edge about zir presence.

She could tell ze was studying the car’s interior, noticing the changes she’d made with a curious eye. Her cloudlet had adjusted the lighting to waking-hours brightness, which made it easy to spot the many differences between this car and a standard car in service throughout any of the four fleets. From the decorative handwoven rug on the floor and the small pair of diamond-shaped paintings near the ceiling on one wall, to the row of polished mechanic’s tools that hung from the elevator’s handrail on another wall, to the waste-disposal unit tucked in one corner that she’d reclaimed from a decommissioned shuttle, any casual passenger could easily determine that Carissa had completely colonized this car.

But not every casual passenger would understand the significance of the small insignias she’d inscribed near the top of each of the doors.

“Explorers Guild and Elevator Guild?” the shapeshifter said, sounding genially impressed.

“I’m an overachiever,” she joked, but ze seemed to take her seriously. “Neither one, lately,” she clarified. “I’m an independent operator at the moment.”

“Are you for hire in some fashion?”

“Isn’t everyone?” she replied. “Not taking new clients.”

“A pity,” the shapeshifter said.

“You don’t even know what I do.”

“Do you explore? In an elevator?”

“Hmm, is it really that obvious?” But then she smiled and said, “I have many useful skills.”

“Do you have a brochure?”

“No, I don’t keep a handy summary of my talents to distribute to any random passenger who falls onto the roof of my car.”

Ze smiled back at her and said, “Not your car, though, is it.”

True, the Association claimed ownership of all the cars in all four fleets. But once someone took a car above Association floors, who gave a fuck what the Association had to say about it? The Association claimed all kinds of bullshit that it couldn’t prove or enforce. Anyway, the cloudlets had their own opinions about who truly owned the elevators, and she was inclined to side with them.

“I’m going to return it in the condition I found it, I swear,” she said, and they shared a laugh.

They were silent for the rest of the ride, politeness enforcing a mutual reluctance to ask deeper questions. She knew plenty of people on the Building networks, but she hadn’t really had a passenger in her car for months. Silence suited her well enough.

Her cloudlet had told her once that it was not uncommon for lonely cars in the fleets to wander aimlessly up and down, waiting for passenger calls that always went to some other car that was closer and quicker to respond. That was the price of ensuring enough cars were in service at all times to provide a reasonable response time. Cloudlets in these cars had no lack of companionship, networked as they were with every other cloudlet in existence; but still, when your mission in life was to serve passengers and then you never saw a single one, your self-esteem suffered ever so slightly.

Carissa, though, deployed a variety of tactics to keep passengers out.

“We’ll be arriving shortly,” her cloudlet announced.

Impulsively, she asked, “Do you … need anything, or are you going to be good out there?” She couldn’t risk giving up her pistol, but she thought she had a spare knife she could let go.

“I couldn’t trouble you further,” the shapeshifter said. “You’ve been truly generous already, and I wish I could repay you.”

“I don’t charge for scraping people off my roof,” Carissa said. “So we’re square. What’s your plan from here, though?”

“Call the next elevator and continue down to my destination,” ze replied.

“Be advised,” her cloudlet said, “that we will be opening doors at an unmapped location. To call a new elevator, you’ll need to locate a mapped elevator location on the floor.”

The elevator had decelerated so smoothly that they were surprised to hear the pleasant ding that preceded the opening of the doors.

---

They stared out at the scene beyond the threshold of the elevator and tried to make sense of what they saw. Carissa propped herself in the doorway so that the elevator doors wouldn’t slide shut without warning.

The elevator doors had opened in the middle of a deserted urban street at dusk. In the distance, you could see the faint glow on the horizon that was undoubtedly Wild Massive Super, with giant spotlights flashing back and forth against the clouds, and sure enough, if you looked closely, you could see the tops of roller coasters peeking out above enormous walls.

You could also hear the distinct chatter of ballistic gunfire in the distance, light peppering punctuated by occasional booms. The walls around the park were taking fire from multiple sources at ground level, but that didn’t stop or even drown out the carousing they heard coming from inside the park itself—gleeful shouting and joyous music and riotous laughter, rising in waves.

“I don’t suppose,” the shapeshifter said, “you know where the nearest mapped elevator location actually is?”

“Inside the park,” the cloudlet replied. “In fact, it’s the only mapped elevator location on this continent.”

Carissa recognized a landmark on the skyline ahead of them, a monument. Inside the walls of the park stood a silver arch, towering above the tallest roller coasters, seeming to scrape the clouds.

“Just a guess here,” Carissa said, “but if there’s an elevator inside the park, I’d start looking for it at the base of the Arch there.”

“You’re familiar with this place?” the shapeshifter asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “This is St. Louis. We’re in America.”

---

“Should I know what that means?” the shapeshifter wondered.

“It’s an Earth floor,” the cloudlet offered as a simple explanation.

“Lots of Earth floors in this Building,” Carissa added.

“I see,” the shapeshifter said. “What happens on these ‘Earth floors’?”

“Murderous extraction of capital value from helpless human beings,” Carissa replied. “And theme parks. We don’t have to drop you off here. Cloudlet, where’s the nearest safe floor with a mapped location on this elevator shaft?”

This was the technically correct question she should have asked up front, instead of simply asking for the nearest safe floor. Her cloudlet was a lovely companion, but you did have to be literal with it on occasion.

There were four elevator shafts, and “mapped” floors could access at least one of them. These were colloquially referred to as Up, Down, Right, and Left, which philosophically—if not always physically—corresponded to the four exterior walls of the Building. Carissa and her cloudlet spent their days traveling up and down the Left elevator shaft, which was unmapped from within this floor, but one of the Up, Down, or Right elevator locations was mapped and permanently accessible from somewhere within the Wild Massive flagship.

If the shapeshifter got off here where the elevator wasn’t mapped, then the minute the doors closed behind zir, the elevator would vanish with no way to summon Carissa back. On floors where the elevators were mapped, if you didn’t like the action on the floor, you just pushed the button and called the next elevator so you could split the place.

“We’ll need to head back up a considerable distance,” the cloudlet replied, “to that restaurant floor you liked. If we continue down much farther, we start running the risk of Association contact.”

“We’re that close to the Association?” the shapeshifter asked, suddenly excited.

“And we’re not getting any closer,” Carissa said, locking eyes with the shapeshifter.

“I see. In that case, perhaps I do need to take my leave of you here. Hopefully the elevator inside the park will take me farther down than you’re willing to travel. I owe you a debt for getting me this far, and I won’t forget—”

“Wait, you’re aiming for the Association?” Carissa interrupted. “But aren’t you…?”

“Yes, I’m Shai-Manak.” When Carissa didn’t seem to immediately grasp the implications, the shapeshifter added, “I’m trying to defect.”

Carissa pondered the implications of that for a long moment.

“Okay, but have you considered not defecting?” she finally said.

The shapeshifter laughed.

“To get inside Wild Massive Super in a legal fashion,” the cloudlet said, “you’ll be expected to produce local, Association, or Wild Massive currency. Do you happen to have any such accounts?”

The shapeshifter slowly shook zir head.

“Your next best option is to join the semipermanent mob laying siege to the park and hope to someday blow a hole in the security walls,” the cloudlet continued. “I don’t suppose you brought something useful for that effort like high-powered lasers or chemical rocketry?”

“No, I didn’t,” the shapeshifter said. “I’m unarmed, as you could well have guessed by now.”

“I’m making a point,” the cloudlet said.

Suddenly, a loud, resounding boom rocked the elevator, and they felt the elevator’s floor buckle upward underneath them. That particular boom sounded like a small explosion, as though something had destroyed the teleport pad that was bolted to the bottom of the elevator.

They each instinctively leapt forward out of the elevator, although Carissa kept her hand in the doorway, holding the doors open. She felt her ears pop as they adjusted to the warm St. Louis air.

“The enforcers have returned,” the shapeshifter said.

“But we dumped them down the elevator shaft!” Carissa protested.

“Many Shai-Manak take forms that can fly,” ze replied.

Then came a familiar rapid pounding sound, as though a flurry of giant fists were probing for a weakness in the floor of the elevator car. Carissa had the suspicion her cute little pistol was going to seem woefully inadequate in a moment.

The enforcers succeeded in ripping open a large hole in the floor, and then a pair of giant claws gripped the edges of the hole and began struggling to pull the rest of a monstrous, demonic body up into the car. The menacing red eyes of the enforcer’s lizard-like face locked on her in surprise.

“Going up, cloudlet!” Carissa shouted.

She pulled her hand out of the doorway, and the elevator doors were now clear to close.

The last Carissa saw of her beloved elevator was the demonic figure struggling to reach the doors to stop them from closing.

Then the elevator doors closed.

Then the elevator doors vanished completely from sight, leaving behind a rippling distortion in the air that persisted mere seconds before local reality reasserted itself. Now they had an unimpeded view down the length of a city street that was currently quiet and empty.

Carissa’s last instruction meant the enforcers would be riding that elevator up for a long time unless they could sweet-talk the cloudlet into letting them off somewhere along the way.

She and the shapeshifter were silent for a long moment.

“I’m sorry you’ve lost your cloudlet friend,” the shapeshifter said.

“Cloudlet knows how to find me when we get separated,” Carissa replied. Then she turned to the shapeshifter, bitterness in her eyes, and said, “But I did have swank fucking headphones on that elevator.”

---

“So after we dropped the enforcers down an elevator shaft,” Carissa said, working it out for herself out loud, “your theory is that they flew right back up the shaft and found us right when we stopped on a safe floor?”

“I think theory is a strong word,” the shapeshifter replied.

“There could’ve been a dozen or a hundred elevators between us at that point,” Carissa continued.

“Or zero,” the shapeshifter pointed out.

“C’mon,” Carissa protested.

“One of our specializations is probability spellcraft,” the shapeshifter said and then fell silent, as though this was all the explanation that was needed.

“Uh-huh,” Carissa said. “And forcing elevator doors open? Isn’t that how you got into the elevator shaft in the first place? It’s relevant because, look, the cloudlet’s just going to keep taking them up no matter what they tell it to do. But they can just drop down through the hole they ripped in the elevator floor and they’ll wind up right back here on this street—assuming they can pry open the doors from inside the elevator shaft. Can they do that? Is that one of your specializations?”

The shapeshifter had to admit, “They cannot repeat my method. But they are sufficiently incentivized to try other methods.”

She debated ditching the shapeshifter altogether and heading off on her own. She could get by in a random America for a while. The enforcers wouldn’t be looking for her.

But it felt like a waste of her elevator and all her belongings to just wander off without making sure the shapeshifter got to safety.

“We need to be inside Wild Massive before that happens,” Carissa said. “Can you run?”

---

They cut over several streets in a zigzag fashion, through alleys and backyards, to get distance from the unmapped elevator location. St. Louis was a ghost town. They met no one along the way, saw no cars on the streets or people on the sidewalks, saw no lights in the houses and apartments.

“What happened here?” the shapeshifter asked.

“I don’t know,” Carissa replied. “Earth floors are all a little different.”

“Why are there people shooting at the park?” the shapeshifter asked.

“Maybe it’s really expensive to get in,” she replied.

Carissa kept them walking at a brisk pace, unsettled by the silence of the streets, wary the enforcers might emerge on their trail at any moment.

“I presume you have a really good reason for defecting,” she said.

The shapeshifter said nothing.

“I mean, you’ve fought off the Association for fifty years,” she continued.

“I personally have done no such fighting.”

“My point stands. Everyone I know is rooting for the Shai-Manak.” Then she added, “The Association deserves the payback.”

“For what, may I ask?”

“Are you serious?” she snapped.

The shapeshifter did not respond.

“Not everyone’s got invincible sorcerers who can knock Fleet warships out of the sky like you,” she said. “Not everyone lasts fifty years.”

“Our people do not fight on anyone’s behalf but our own. We do not consider revenge a principle worth pursuing.”

“Then why fight them at all?”

“That is a question I have asked more than once,” ze replied ruefully. “The Association is keen to find our home floor, but we could migrate to another. The Association is unwilling to accept magical power greater than its own, but we could teach them. The Association is unwilling to suffer an army above its borders that it can’t understand, but we abandoned peace talks before they could bear fruit. We fight because our floor has been our home for thousands of years—why should we accept an inevitable invasion? It is … difficult to argue with such tribalism.”

“So you’re defecting to … what, teach your own people a lesson?”

Ze fell silent for so long that Carissa thought the conversation was over.

But then ze said, “We’re about to cross a terrible line. I’m trying to save many lives.” A whisper: “Someone has to try.”

Carissa felt chilled and let silence finally fall.

As the park loomed larger ahead of them, they finally did start to see traffic—automobiles pulling off the nearest freeway, heading for the gigantic, well-defended parking lot. She could see buses running from the farthest edges of the parking lot up to the front gate.

“How are you planning on getting inside this park?” she said.

“I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

Carissa was pretty sure ze wasn’t going to think of anything.

“Can’t you just shapeshift into a bird and fly over the wall or something?” she asked.

“We don’t all fly,” the shapeshifter replied.

She sighed and said, “I’ll buy us day passes.”

“I don’t expect I’ll be able to repay you.”

“It’s okay, I steal all my money, anyway.”

---

The Super park’s border walls were only under attack in designated protest zones as determined by the city of St. Louis in negotiation with the park. Any attempts to attack the park outside those zones were met with sonic weapons that targeted the offenders with a deadly rendition of Helpless the Bunny’s theme song—Helpless being Wild Massive’s devious but lovable corporate mascot. Cars coming off the freeway could cruise right up to the front gates and gain admittance to the vast parking lot without fear of reprisal from the angry mobs.

Foot traffic coming from the city or from the commuter buses that dropped suburban guests off at the perimeter was steered along a path to the front gate, helped along by moving walkways to help cover the distance. They saw enormous signs warning them that no weapons of any size or class were allowed inside the park, and each guest would pass through a series of security scans to enforce this rule.

Carissa realized she’d have to ditch her pistol and knife. She sighed deeply as she found a trash can where she could surreptitiously dump the items. She’d never had occasion to fire the gun in self-defense, so maybe it wasn’t such a big deal to lose it. And this was not the first time in her life she’d found herself on the run with no possessions but the clothes on her back (it was the third).

Well, to be fair—and thank god—she had her tablet tucked away in her pocket, along with half a pouch of first aid pills. The tablet was key to accessing her various guild accounts and finding her cloudlet again. The first aid pills—well, she just liked having them around. You could get them out of vending machines in a few secret locations scattered around the Building, but they were frequently sold out.

After twenty minutes in line, they were close enough to the front gate that they could observe a bit of the security operation from a distance. The list of potential hazards any guest could be carrying was extensive. They ran each individual through a series of increasingly intimidating scanning booths in order to root out shit like nano-assembled needle guns that you hid as a distributed subdermal swarm of nanites, or maybe you swallowed some exotic compound that lived in your gut and exploded when you later digested the right cola beverage, or maybe your eyes were equipped with invisible micron lasers that cut people apart without revealing your position, that kind of bullshit.

Let’s say this weaponry you were carrying was legal where you came from. Might even be legal right here in St. Louis, America. It wasn’t legal inside the park, and if you tried to get inside with any of it, the friendly and ruthless security apparatus of the Wild Massive corporation would be delighted to dissuade you of that notion. The front gate was manned exclusively by mercenaries who knew this shit backward and forward. You weren’t scamming your way past these bruisers. They took the safety of their guests seriously at Wild Massive parks and resorts.

Sure, you could still try to kill someone with your bare hands if you wanted to, but they also had security inside, obviously.

“I don’t like this,” said the shapeshifter. “They’re claiming they can read and store an individual’s magical signature for surveillance purposes.”

The signs called out a special procedure for “magic-users and magical entities.” They used a lot of magic inside the park to pull off a wide range of illusions and special effects, so they couldn’t just blanket the whole park with magic dampeners to keep the guests from spellcasting and call it a day. But they couldn’t erase the spells from a wizard’s brain for the duration of a visit, either, nor did they want to prohibit any supernatural beings from entering on the grounds that magic literally coursed through their veins or whatnot.

They solved that problem by—registration, apparently? Some kind of tagging system? You got a special ankle bracelet? And then—if you cast a hostile spell, a drone or something put a bullet in your skull? They weren’t really explicit about the consequences of violating the “no magic inside the park” policy. Carissa could guess what was technically “allowed” per the law in St. Louis, but Wild Massive tended to carve out legal exceptions for its properties that allowed it to operate like an independent city-state.

“Look, all you need to do is get to the elevator,” Carissa said. “Maybe someone will eventually be able to trace that you’ve been here, but so what? You’ll be long gone before then.”

That thought seemed to assuage the shapeshifter for the time being.

---

They were temporarily separated into two different lines after the shapeshifter acknowledged ze was a sorcerer. With bored efficiency, security subjected them to a variety of scans inside five or six weird-looking contraptions. Apparently, despite all the engineering prowess Wild Massive had at its disposal, they simply couldn’t figure out how to do all these scans in a single booth. She sailed through the screenings without incident and was reunited with the shapeshifter a few minutes later. Ze seemed unperturbed about zir experience.

At the ticket booth, Carissa took the lead. She had a dozen different financial accounts tied to a variety of identities she could use for occasions like this, where some form of background check was likely at the point of sale. You didn’t need an Association ID to earn and spend Association currency, so none of her alternate identities were Association citizens; you had to do business with someone like the Pirate King to get a fake Association ID, and that was out of her league. But these IDs she’d created and collected for herself were perfectly appropriate for the task of buying Wild Massive day passes without triggering the park’s fraud defenses.

With passes in hand, they quickly made their way into the park proper, emerging into a central riverfront plaza at the base of the Arch.

Carissa was overwhelmed by the press of humanity in the plaza. And it was definitely humanity for the most part. The Earth floors were humanocentric, and America was always the worst about making sure other species felt like shit for even bothering to step off the elevator. Certainly, Wild Massive, a media empire with interests on countless floors of the Building, was a more enlightened corporation than its choice of location here might signify, but that didn’t translate into designing its Earth rides with nonhuman accessibility in mind.

After living alone in her own elevator for so long, Carissa was unprepared for so much tangible excitement from such a large crowd, so she signaled for the shapeshifter to follow her away from the general masses, toward an open park bench where she could get a chance to catch her breath. She pulled out her tablet and connected to the park network, accessing maps of every park neighborhood.

Naturally, the mapped elevator was proudly highlighted; it would be easy to get to from here. Wild Massive had scored a true coup on this Earth floor by acquiring complete control of access to an elevator.

The mapped elevator location essentially functioned as another “front gate” experience for guests, with its own security screening operation, but with the disadvantage of being positioned awkwardly in the midst of the park. This made it a traffic choke point and a visual distraction that needed special accommodation.

They’d designed the park layout so that you could emerge from the elevator and easily transfer to a shuttle train that whisked you away to the park resort if you wanted to check into your room or, more likely, suite. Otherwise, you’d be diverted down a long footpath, winding onto the riverfront plaza at the base of the Arch to start your Wild Massive experience.

The rest of the park flowed around the elevator bank in clever ways so that the elevator itself was obscured from sight lines by trees or structures as you roamed the park proper. Once you got off the elevator and entered the park, you wouldn’t accidentally be reminded of the elevator’s existence until you were ready to leave.

But one thing was clear: you didn’t just make a whimsical decision to ditch the park by jumping on the elevator. Reservations were a requirement. At the other entrances, they could design for throughput, but the immutable fact in this case was that only a single elevator would ever be open in this location at once. They’d installed an anchor station here, thankfully, so they could teleport new elevators through relatively quickly, but you were still facing annoying logistics if you needed to exit the park this way.

The earliest the shapeshifter could get a reservation was two hours from now. A small VIP line moved much quicker, but Carissa hadn’t even considered paying the exorbitant price for VIP passes. Of course, she’d definitely paid enough that she planned to stay in the park after the shapeshifter was gone, to get a rare bit of leisurely enjoyment out of her investment.

The shapeshifter’s frustration was palpable. Ze politely argued for a few minutes with the attendant at the entrance to the elevator pavilion, but the attendant stood firm. People probably tried to squeeze onto this elevator without a reservation on a semi-regular basis. They probably trained park employees in ways to calmly and firmly defuse tempers when working in this specific location.

Clearly defeated, the shapeshifter turned away from the pavilion, pondering options.

Zir eventual idea was to sit across from the pavilion at a bench and wait patiently until zir reservation time.

Carissa had no problem empathizing with someone who was on the run and in trouble. She didn’t quite feel like letting the matter drop just yet.

“We have time to ride at least one ride in two hours,” said Carissa. “Take your mind off things for a bit.”

“I’m not looking to take my mind off anything,” the shapeshifter replied.

“Fair,” she replied. “You can keep worrying the whole time if you want. But I think you should keep moving. No sense in making yourself an obvious target sitting in front of the only way off this floor.”

She wandered back to the pavilion and asked the attendant at the reservation booth what the best ride experience in the park was.

The attendant replied without hesitation, “You absolutely have to do the Storm and Desire ride. It’s called Rise of the Brilliant.”

Carissa’s blood ran absolutely cold.

“I’m sorry, what did you just say?” she said.

“Rise of the Brilliant,” the attendant repeated. “That’s the name of the new Storm and Desire ride.” The attendant misinterpreted Carissa’s stunned look as bewilderment, perhaps, and said, “Don’t worry, I hear it’s still pretty great even if you’re not caught up on Storm and Desire.”

“I bet,” Carissa said. “Thanks for the tip.”

She drifted away from the pavilion and sat down heavily next to the shapeshifter, a slow sense of shock unfolding within her.

The shapeshifter noticed her apparent distress and quietly said, “Is something out of order?”

“Nope,” Carissa replied. She might be far from the usual methods of Association surveillance, but she wasn’t about to admit to a complete stranger that the “rise of the Brilliant” in reality had been followed rather quickly by the “complete annihilation of the Brilliant, except for a single survivor that no one knows about because if they did, she’d be dead, too.”

---

Storm and Desire was one of the crown jewels of the Wild Massive media empire, an incredibly popular, long-running intermedia series. The trunk of the narrative was a planned series of twelve thematic arcs comprised of many episodes each, released over the course of almost two centuries by this point. The story unfolded primarily in virtual environments, which offered the fullest experience when it came to immersion. Some people had acquired machine interfaces and drug ports solely so they could take advantage of the full sensorium of data that the narrative production of Storm and Desire had to offer.

The overarching story of the Storm and Desire milieu was ostensibly an alternate history of the Association, as told from the perspective of Dimension Force, the small band of heroic Agents who were responsible for keeping it safe from extraordinary dangers. Crucially, Wild Massive was not incorporated within the Association, and most everyone understood perfectly well that the series regularly took all the liberties its creators felt were necessary to generate desired dramatic effects.

In fact, fan boards and trade pubs alike assumed that the Association even fed secret information to the producers to enhance certain story lines on occasion. If the Association was occasionally portrayed as morally gray, or individuals within it as outright corrupt, the overall halo effect was still positive. This was free PR, as far as the Association was concerned, and anyway, Wild Massive’s version of history was clearly more interesting to the public than the truth could ever be.

Dimension Force likely played along as well. The series presented the Agents of Dimension Force as flawed but mythical figures, played in the series by charismatic actors given top-notch dialogue, which neatly clouded the fact that Dimension Force in reality was a mercenary group whose primary client was the Association.

The Storm and Desire experience at Wild Massive Super was a marvel of physical and magical narrative engineering. Even the most jaded of park guests found themselves swept away by how convincing the “live action” experiences were compared to the virtual baseline. Experts on the fan boards suspected that psychotropic mists played an undue part in achieving such an immersive effect, but everyone agreed the ride environments were incredibly well designed and highly entertaining regardless. And the extra bits of storytelling you got during the ride experiences were considered canon, which held obvious appeal for many fans.

Carissa was conflicted about the whole series. She’d made it through about half of it and given up. Maybe these Agents were truly heroes; they were easy to admire and even like when you engaged with these stories from their points of view. But in reality, the Association controlled its interests with a ruthless and merciless efficiency, and she was certain Wild Massive would never accurately depict the full extent of the atrocities the Association had committed during its reign. In the stories, it was a bastion of hope in the face of a cruel and uncaring multiverse. In reality, it was as cruel and uncaring as you could get.

If you were an average citizen of the Association, you might live and breathe these stories. If you lived elsewhere in the Building, you might enjoy these stories as adventure-driven voyeurism into another way of life. But if you were the sole survivor of a genocide at the hands of the Association, as Carissa was, you’d likely have a more nuanced take on the merits of Storm and Desire.

---

Carissa pulled out her tablet, began searching for plot summaries that could rapidly catch her up on Storm and Desire. To her dawning irritation and horror, she quickly learned that the series had only recently begun its eleventh arc out of twelve. It was focused on the series of events that led to the Association carpet-bombing her tribe, the Brilliant, out of existence. If they played it straight, this would be the first proper tragedy among the Storm and Desire arcs to date.

Oh, the audience didn’t know that’s where the eleventh arc was headed, of course. But Carissa knew, because she’d been an integral part of all of it.

And maddeningly, the series was positioning people she knew as principal antagonists in their version of events.

She pulled up photos and short video clips promoting the ride to get a taste of what to expect. Rise of the Brilliant was meant to showcase how mysterious and dangerous the Brilliant were, all from within the safe confines of a Wild Massive ride vehicle.

Her brother was one of the featured antagonists.

She wanted to act out in some preposterous fashion, but she’d also spent a long time burying that exact feeling, so instead, she sat in silence. The only indication that she was under strain was the slight tremble in her hand as she held the tablet in front of her and stared straight through it.

Finally, a realization locked into focus in her mind. She stood up, steeling herself to join the flow of foot traffic in front of her.

“I hope the rest of your defection goes well,” she said.

“Thank you for keeping me alive,” the shapeshifter replied.

“Don’t mention it,” she replied. “Literally—pretend you never met me.”

She wandered away from the elevator pavilion, heading deeper into the park, toward Rise of the Brilliant.

She owed it to her people to understand how they were being “memorialized” by the culture at large.

And she missed her brother too much to skip an opportunity to see him again—even a totally fucked-up opportunity like this one was shaping up to be.