Shadow Sun Survival Read online

  Shadow Sun

  Survival

  By

  Dave Willmarth

  Copyright © 2019 by Dave Willmarth

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  All characters and events depicted in this novel are entirely fictitious. Any similarity to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Chapter One

  Devastation

  The earth trembled as Allistor ran through the rubble of his hometown. He stumbled when the ground shifted beneath him just as he placed his forward foot on a broken concrete slab. Using his momentum to control his fall, he rolled forward and came back to his feet, barely slowing.

  The thing behind him was gaining ground. It wasn’t pursuing him in particular, but rather herding the small number of survivors of which Allistor was one. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a child stumble and fall, tripping her mother in the process. The two went down in a tangle maybe a hundred yards from him, the girl sobbing hysterically from fear. Her mother looked up at the monstrosity bearing down on them and chose to try and hide. She picked up her child and scurried under the remnant of a half-collapsed stone wall.

  Allistor shouted at her even as he changed direction toward them. “No! Don’t stop! Keep moving!” but there was no way she heard him above the pounding of the monster’s footsteps and the sound of crashing debris. He pushed his tired legs as fast as they would go, angling toward their position. A glance up at their approaching doom told him he wasn’t going to make it. Still, he pushed himself.

  He let out a scream of frustrated rage as he lost his race. The monster’s right foot came down directly on top of the hiding spot the mother had chosen. Allistor imagined he heard a brief scream, abruptly cut off as the two innocents died. Looking up, he directed his rage at their killer. The thing that had single-handedly destroyed his home and killed nearly everyone he knew. Out of frustration he grabbed a broken chunk of concrete from the ground and flung it upward at the monster’s head with all the strength he could muster.

  Void Titan

  Level 10

  Health 7,810/8,000

  The rock bounced off the thick skin of its face, doing a single point of damage, and not even attracting its attention. The monster was three times his level, and he hadn’t really expected to do any damage. It continued on its path, disregarding him completely as it pursued a group of townsfolk that were firing ineffective weapons at it as they retreated toward the river.

  How the hell are we supposed to beat something like that? Allistor thought as he collapsed atop a rubble pile, exhausted. It has been almost a week since the apocalypse, and I’m only level three. Dad killed more of these new creatures than anyone, and he was only level five when they got him.

  He paused, wiping his eyes with the back of one hand as he thought of his family. When it all happened on that first day, the day everyone was now calling Apocalypse Day, they had all been together at the house. He’d come home from college to visit his parents and little sister for the break. They were all still asleep in the pre-dawn hours when the sky seemed to catch fire, and the ear-shattering blast of what sounded like a giant foghorn ripped through the early morning silence. The house had vibrated, windows rattling and cracking under the assault. Allistor had covered his ears in an attempt to muffle the noise before his brain burst.

  A moment after the tremendous sound ceased, Allistor and everyone else on the planet received a notice. It came to him as both a voice in his head and a strange text that appeared in front of his face like a hologram. Initially, the text looked like nothing more than scribbled lines of electric blue. But as the voice in his head continued to speak, the scribbles resolved themselves into characters that he somehow understood.

  >>>Attention all inhabitants of the planet known as Earth<<<

  Your world and everything on it has just been claimed by the Universal Collective as compensation for protecting you from your sun’s supernova.

  Earth, now designated UCP 382, has been removed from its orbit and placed in a stable system closer to the Galactic Nexus. You will have three of your solar days to prepare yourselves. Detailed information can be found in the ‘DETAILS’ subsection of your status interface.

  It has been determined that UCP 382 is currently overpopulated. The dominant species, known as humans, have polluted the lands and seas to an unacceptable level. Measures will be taken to reduce the human population and stabilize the environment before citizens of other Collective worlds will be allowed to immigrate. Initial estimate of human population reduction level is ninety percent.

  And that was it. No further explanation. Allistor had initially assumed it was a nightmare inspired by way too many hours of gaming, and he tried to go back to sleep. But his sister, Leah, began pounding on his door, then burst in with wide eyes. “Did you hear that?”

  Allistor was about to chase her out of his room when his parents appeared behind her. His father’s face was grim, and his mother immediately gathered Leah into a tight hug.

  “You… you guys all heard that too? Saw the weird holo-thing with the words?” Allistor had sat back on his bed, legs unsteady. His family all nodded at him.

  “This can’t be. I mean, it can’t be real. Some kind of mass hallucination or something, right?” His mother looked at his father, hope and fear in her eyes.

  Allistor’s father, George, was a former mayor, town councilman and retired soldier. He’d fought in three different wars over the fifty years he’d served. Nearly half of his body, including parts of both legs, one arm, and his right eye, were cyberbiotic replacements for bits he’d lost in combat. Just over halfway through the 21st century, the human race had gotten almost as good at putting the body back together as they were at tearing it apart.

  George shook his head slowly, putting an arm around his wife and daughter as he looked at Allistor. “This sounds almost like one of your damned games, boy. Could somebody be playing some kind of prank?”

  Allistor didn’t have a clue. He tried to reason it out aloud. “They said the sun went nova. I remember the sky being on fire.” He looked out the window. Everything outside had a bluish tint to it. “Look!”

  His bedroom had a single French door leading out to the back deck that overlooked their pool. George opened the door and stepped out, looking up at the sky. He cursed quietly to himself as he stepped to the side and made room for the others to join him. Allistor and the others looked up.

  There were two suns in the heavens above them. One a pale, almost white ball of fire just cresting above the horizon. The other was a much smaller dark blue, almost purple sphere higher up in the morning sky. Allistor searched the rapidly lightening space above them, looking for any of the familiar constellations. He blinked at the sheer number of stars visible.

  George had a similar reaction. “It’s… the sky is so full. Even out in the desert during the war, the sky was never this full of stars. I mean, they were always out there, but not close enough for us to see like this. I… think maybe they really did move Earth. Or, move us and make us think they moved Earth. But wherever we are, I think we’re much closer to the center of a galaxy than we were before. The density of stars…” his voice drifted off as he took in the implications of their new situation.

  Leah had stopped crying and was staring at the suns. “So, like, these people moved our whole planet a bazillion light years in seconds? And where’s the m
oon?”

  Her mother rubbed her back gently and answered. “They can’t be ‘people’ like us if they want to kill ninety percent of us! And Leah’s right? Where’s the moon? Without it there should be earthquakes and tidal waves, right?” Tears were running down her face now, and she hugged Leah tightly. “Is this the end of everything?”

  Allistor’s brain ached. He wasn’t sure if it was from the foghorn assault or the flood of incredible information. As he wondered whether he was suffering some kind of brain damage, another holographic screen popped up in his field of vision. As a lifelong gamer, he recognized it as a character status. Looking at his family, he asked “Can you guys see this? My screen, I mean?”

  They all shook their heads no, and Leah asked, “What screen?”

  Allistor poked a finger at his own hologram, saying, “Try thinking ‘status’ and see what happens. He watched as all three of them began to stare into space. If he wasn’t so scared, he might have laughed at his family looking like game avatars with the thousand-yard stare as they checked their UIs.

  He went back to examining his own screen as the brighter sun continued to rise. In the back of his mind, he noted that his skin was warming quickly under the brighter light.

  His stat sheet was pretty straightforward, and his numbers were pathetic.

  A prompt appeared below the stats.

  Human #1,512,241,003 would you like to change your designation? Y/N

  Allistor rolled his eyes upward at the question, looking to see if there was a ‘tag’ above his head with that ridiculously long number. If there was, he couldn’t see it. And there wasn’t one visible above any of his family members’ heads either. He clicked “Yes” and a new prompt appeared.

  Please state clearly your new designation.

  He said, “Allistor,” while picturing the spelling of his name. One advantage of the unusual spelling of his name was that even in games with millions of players, nobody ever beat him to his own name. A quick check of his status screen showed his designation had been updated. He took a minute to review his other stats, finding that if he focused on any one of them, more detail would appear in a secondary screen that was an opaque green. Most of the stats were pretty clear, standard for many of the MMORPGs he’d played. A few caught his attention, though.

  He focused on Adaptability. The detail read: Inhabitants of backward or undeveloped worlds such as UCP 382 often have difficulty adjusting to the new realities of membership in the Collective. Those with an initial adaptability rating of three or lower often perish in the early days of assimilation. Higher adaptability scores enable one to better assess new situations and surroundings, identify potential dangers and benefits, and adjust themselves or their actions in order to achieve a more positive outcome.

  He was moving on to read about Constitution when George stopped staring at his own screen to address his son. “Any chance you can explain all of this to us old farts, kiddo?” He winked at his wife and daughter, trying to lighten the mood a bit.

  “Sure!” Allistor was happy to help. Especially since he’d caught so much grief over the years for always being in his VR worlds. His dad actually enjoyed VR games as well, but he was a first person shooter guy, not an RPG gamer.

  His mother cut him off before he could say more. “Let’s go back inside and talk. This sky… scares me.” She gazed nervously up at the sky, pushing Leah toward the door with quick steps.

  Back in the house, they all took seats in the family room. Allistor was just beginning to explain about attributes, having them each pull up their health bars, when his phone went off. It was a text from a guildmate in his current VRMMORPG. A moment later, his sister’s phone went off too. Their father shook his head, and neither of them answered. But it was comforting to know the network was still working.

  For the next half hour, Allistor walked his family through their entire stat sheets, teaching them about how attributes could be used to boost each other, and how to specialize in certain classes or play styles. And he learned a good bit himself. For instance – Constitution was a factor in several things. Overall health pool and regeneration rate. Resistance to extreme heat or cold, poison resistance, and physical damage resistance.

  His research also showed him that the attributes point scores weren’t based on ‘human’ norms. The numbers were calculated based on the average base starting stats of all the species within the Collective. So if a two in strength was slightly below the human average, it was much lower than the Collective average. Humans in general ranked low in almost every attribute compared to their new neighbors.

  There were obvious differences in his family’s stats. His father was heavy on Strength and Constitution, while his mother favored Intelligence and Will Power. Leah only had a one in Adaptability, but she had fives in Agility, Stamina, and Dexterity.

  As they talked, Allistor’s attention was repeatedly drawn to a timer that remained in the upper right corner of his visual field even when he waved away his stats. It was just over seventy-one hours and counting down. The original message had said that Earth had three days to prepare. But prepare for what?

  “Hey guys, you all see that timer? Something big’s gonna happen in three days. Maybe the something that’s gonna kill 90% of the human race. The voice said to read the ‘Details’ tab. So I say let’s all focus on that and read up. Right now. So we know sooner rather than later what it is we’re preparing for.”

  They all settled back in their seats as they located the correct tab and began to read.

  Welcome to the Collective! Your world has been found (barely) worthy of membership. Mainly for its natural resources. Being in the outer reaches of the Collective’s territory, repeated travel to and from your world and the Nexus worlds would have been cost prohibitive. So the Collective initiated a supernova of your system’s sun, harvesting its power and using a portion of it to relocate planet UCP 382 to a more accessible location.

  Citizens of the Nexus worlds will be offered the right to purchase lands and resources on UCP 382 once the planet has been stabilized. However, in the interest of fair play, the Collective does not simply seize a planet and sell off its parts. The inhabitants of the planet are given an opportunity to prove their worth and earn a share of their homeworld. This can be achieved via many paths.

  In the case of UCP 382, simply surviving the reduction of human population will entitle you to land and resources sufficient to survive the remainder of your lifetime. Improving your attributes through completion of quests, intensive training, and/or killing of other life forms will increase your chances of survival.

  Conquest of territory is another means by which you may improve your station within the Collective and ensure a comfortable life on this planet or another. Collective citizens from other Nexus planets are required to wait one year from the date of assimilation before they can bid on UCP 382. This ‘stabilization period’ allows you and your fellow ‘Earthlings’ time to develop yourselves, your skills and abilities, and to secure as much of the planet as you can for yourselves. Once the bidding is opened, you may elect to retain what you hold or sell some portion of it on the open market.

  Fame is another means of achieving status within the Collective. Your activities may be monitored by off-world citizens as you grow and attempt to seize assets. Some will be watching in anticipation of taking advantage of you post-stabilization. Others will seek to aid you with gifts of useful items or knowledge to further their own entertainment. Heroic deeds will earn you Fame points, just as cruel and immoral deeds will earn you Infamy points. Both Fame and Infamy, upon reaching a high enough level, can ensure a place for you among certain societies.

  Lastly, as it has always been and always will be, fiscal success can secure your future. Accumulating large quantities of currency in many forms may allow you to purchase a territory of your liking on your planet or others. Your ‘Earth’ currencies shall remain static through the stabilization period for purposes of planetary commerce between yourselves
. Each unit of measure will be accompanied on your interface with its real-time equivalent in Collective currency, called klax or K’s for short. For example, an ounce of pure water is currently valued at 10 klax. An ounce of gold is worth 1,100 klax today. Be warned, prices and values vary greatly from world to world. And dishonest entrepreneurs abound.

  All of these paths can be traveled alone or in groups. There is sometimes strength in numbers. But choosing the wrong companions can slow you down or hold you back. So choose wisely.

  Mandatory Quest Accepted: Survive One Year

  Reward: Variable experience. Land Grant – size variable. Ten Thousand klax.

  Congratulations! If you’ve read this far, you might just be among the survivors. Work hard, get stronger, and build your area of influence.

  The better your performance, the greater the reward.

  Below this summary was a series of additional tabs. There were dozens of them. Some were deeper explanations of territory rights, fame, currency conversion rates, and other information from the text above. Allistor noted them and moved on, looking for information on the three-day countdown. Leah began to freak out after reading through the notice. “We’re dead! This is it - game over! I don’t want to get eaten by some alien. Just kill me now!”

  Allistor tuned her out as their mother tried to calm her.

  He finally found what he wanted under a tab labeled “Stabilization Procedures.” Opening up the tab and reading the information within, he began to tremble.

  Stabilization of UPC 382 will commence three solar days from assimilation date. Priority One: Reduce human population to sustainable levels.

  Estimated optimum population reduction: Ninety-one point five percent.

  Priority Two: Reduce environmental contaminants.

  Estimated industrial infrastructure reduction necessary: Eighty-five percent.

  Focus on destruction of facilities harvesting or consuming fossil fuels.