KindleButcher Chapters 1 and 2 (Patreon)

I'm working on the manuscript for Butcher of Gadobhra for my publisher, Aethon Books. The early chapters aren't my best writing, being the first writing I ever published. And, frankly, had no idea people would read it. They need some work. Plus, I want the story to start with more focus on the characters. These two chapters are all new and will precede the current first chapter. Don't worry about typos. The first thing that happens is a skilled line editor from Aethon goes over all of it.

==================================================

Chapter 1

The evening sun was setting across the inner sea as one of Her Majesty's sleek airships cruised the skies after another successful adventure. Colonel Carruthers, Count Veelo, and Dr. Barklight were enjoying a roasted leg of veal with garlic potatoes prepared by the Colonel’s Butler, Ozymandias, the only servant who accompanied them upon their adventures when they left the airship. He acted as a porter, camp master, chef, trailblazer and dishwasher.

This week's VR adventure had gone surprisingly well despite a few setbacks. The good doctor’s skill at map reading had led them into the middle of a cannibal village and into the stew pot. Luckily, the native tribe was willing to trade the recipes in the Butler’s cookbook for their release. To celebrate, he prepared a huge pot of his mother's best chicken and dumplings, after which the explorers went on their way before the next meal.

With more eyes on the map, they found the lost temple and traded the Colonel’s cufflinks to a colony of monkeys for the keys to the treasure vault. It was only a short walk across a crumbling rope bridge after that, which resulted in the Doctor and Count falling onto a small island in the pit where a monster crocodile lived. All looked lost until, in his haste to find a length of rope, the Butler clumsily dropped the inflatable raft and air canister into the open mouth of the hungry reptile. The raft had inflated within the beast, causing it great distress and embarrassment, and it slunk away into the jungle.

After they were picked up on the airship, the Butler prepared dinner and served drinks so his employers could recover from their harrowing adventure and plan for next week. The decision was made to head to a small group of islands to the west of them. The Butler was taking notes to plan the adventure properly.

“Very good, sir. I’ll have the airship ready to go for next weekend’s adventure. Your skills and bravery are needed around the world. A cable arrived just this afternoon from the Golden Monks of Mandipoor, beseeching your aid. Something about a long-lost enchanted tea set. And the Lady Flyers Auxiliary sent a cable. It seems Countess Froufrou has crashed on the Jungle Isle of Braneelo. Either quest offers adventure, loot, and additional awards of a pleasurable nature. Which shall it be, sir?”

Colonel Carruthers mulled over the decision but came to a quick conclusion “Harumph…Countess Froufrou? That woman can lose her way and half her clothing in the most interesting ways. A damsel in distress trumps monks and a tea set, even if they do make a good cup of tea. To Braneelo, it shall be Ozymandias!”

Count Veelo was looking at his notebook. “Excellent. I’ll be needing a break after next week. We’ve been driving down the stock of a small company called Exelon for months, and it is finally time to scoop it up, merge it with Raxxon’s energy division, and make a hefty profit. After a full week of clearing out the old employees, I’ll be up for a little exploration and recreation with the Lady Flyers. By the way, we’ll be making our move when the stock hits 17 cents a share, gentlemen; buying in at 18 to 20 will let you triple your money overnight.”

The Colonel turned to his butler, “Pass that tip onto the accountant, please, Ozzy. That’s a good chap.”

“Curses! We are undone!” Doctor Barklight was drumming his fingers and holding up a calendar. “I have an all-hands meeting with the Board of ACME. Something about a new game on the horizon and getting in on the ground floor.”

Carruthers looked up from his veal suddenly, nearly spilling his wine. “Curses, indeed! I’d forgotten. We have a similar meeting at Teslatech. It completely slipped my mind.  A new game can’t come soon enough. It’s nearly impossible to run our direct-to-customer merchanting through this dinosaur. It’s gone to shit since we lost the AI support. Isn’t the new one supposed to be an improved version?”

Barklight nodded. “I’m refreshing my memory now from the memos. I wasn’t sure the board would bite on the proposal. That damned pile of circuits is in charge of this one. It wants to only use the MK7 pods. Horribly expensive things. Especially when the buy-in for each corporation is supplying them for all of the human-run NPCs. Why do we need humans to run the NPCs if an AI runs things again?”

“Need I remind you, my friend, that we now have only one AI in the world? Not 106.  An overworked one, from all accounts. I’m amazed that all those self-driving cars your company makes don’t pile up in heaps. Silly having an AI directing a billion cars whizzing around at a hundred miles an hour.

Carruthers failed to rise to the challenge of the taunt. He’d heard it before. “Do you see me using one? It’s unnerving. A man should be able to drive his own sports car. But the AI does its job. We only had 146 accidents worldwide last year, and those were almost entirely human-caused. But I am intrigued about this game. The VR is claimed to be far superior to what we have here. I’ll be happy when my veal doesn’t taste like an overcooked hotdog.”

As the conversation paused, the butler asked a quiet question. “Should I make plans to accompany you to this conference, Colonel?”

The Colonel shook his head, “No, and not by my choice. There is supposed to be a large dinner, followed by a presentation. Silly to not allow us to bring servants. But don’t worry, dear boy, whether it’s adventuring in this old game or a new one, there’s no one else I’d rather have at my side. But you should hustle and speak to my accountant. We’ll pick up in two weeks and be off to rescue the lovely Countess Froufrou.

“Very good, sir, until then.” Ozzy bowed and walked to the galley, and logged out. Hopefully, the three of them didn’t wreck the airship, and the game didn’t glitch on them. That had happened last week, dumping them all into the ocean and ending the scenario early. Ozzy’s base pay for each session was small and depended on generous tips, which was why he augmented his meager income by selling what he learned from the casual conversation of corporate vice presidents.

Rather than leave his gaming pod, he logged into another section of the game. This one was a cheap pirate simulation without most of the VR senses. Ozzy counted that as a blessing as he walked into the small pub and didn’t have to smell the stale beer and sweaty men hovering over their warm beer or playing dice. He walked to the back, where Blarney Bob sat at a table with two of his cronies.

“Well, well, my old pal, the Butcher of Barcelona, finally shows his face. You owe me a beer, I think, or do you have a tale to tell.”

Ozzy laughed, “A tale. One that these two don’t need to hear. Beat it.” The two sailors moved away to another table. Ozzy sat and waited until he was sure no one was around. “Owe you a beer? I think you owe me about ten grand and not in-game money. What the hell, Bob? It’s unlike you to be late on a payment.”

Bob scratched his ear and looked sheepish. “Yeah, well, I’ve been busy. I have some hot tips. Big stuff is going down. They’re getting ready to shut down a lot of the old VR worlds. Just not profitable without the sale of real-world goods and services. Have you seen the casinos on the Spanish Main? You can’t gamble with real money anymore. You can’t shop for a good book at the Nile Bookstore; they only sell in-game scrolls and history books. It’s sad as hell.”

He looked at Ozzy, his eyes narrowing. “But what if I told you that your old friend Bob has a line on a new hush-hush game that no one seems to know about yet.”

Ozzy lit a cigar and blew smoke at him. Sadly, the smoke was just graphics, and you couldn’t even do smoke rings. “I’d say you owe me ten grand, and I’m going to be selling Jimmy Weavil the info I got today on a drive-down acquisition. A big one.”

Bob sighed, “So fixated on a dollar sign, where has the trust in the world gone?”

Ozzy’s voice had no humor in it. “Dead, along with the last of the big VRMMO games, the A.I. that ran them, and my regular paychecks. Dollars are important when you rely on weekly side gigs in private scenarios. The bastards are worth millions but cheap when it comes to tipping. So, what’s it going to be? The ten grand, or give me the info upfront and let me judge its worth? I’m not buying bullshit today.”

“OK, OK! What if I told you this new game had openings for guaranteed, long-term employment, and it came with healthcare? And before you call me a liar, I can back up my claims. There are over a hundred corporations holding big bashes this next weekend, all online. That’s the rollout for the new system. I’ve verified that the high-level execs of Alexa Corp, Alchemarx, CubeFood, PentexChem, Nile Books, OmegaMart, MegaMouse, and Yodadyne are all away this weekend for special meetings. And a lot of mid-level management as well.”

Ozzy thought for a moment. “I’d tell you that you can add Teslatech, Raxxon, and ACME to your list. All my ‘Victorian Gentlemen’ are away that weekend as well.”

Bob’s face fell. “Shit, then word is going to get out soon.” He drummed his fingers. “How good is your tip?”

“Guaranteed triple your money in a day, but it’s stocks, and you have to be buying at the right moment. It’s going to take a huge downturn, hover, and shoot back.”

Bob was conflicted. “Look, if I pay you, the stock tip is worthless. I won’t have the money to buy in. If I’m not seen putting money into a deal, no one else will. But I’ve got something worth the 10k. I’m supposed to get a crew together for the ACME shindig: cooks, waiters, and general staff to run the event. I need twenty-five people. You can pick your own crew and charge what you want as your hiring fee. Pay is a thousand per person, per day, for two days of work, but they have to have experience in VR—minimum 20k hours online, with double pay for 40k hours. “

Ozzy whistled softly. Two thousand credits was a lot of money these days, and not a lot of people had that kind of experience. A 40-hour week only added up to 2k hours a year. These guys wanted people who had ten years of full-time experience. Granted, some people stayed in a pod for over two weeks at a time, but that was still a lot of online time. Ozzy had over 80k hours, and so did many of his best friends. Living on the bottom end of society meant jobs were scarce., and at least your body got fed while you were in a pod. You could save more money living online.

“Good pay for a weekend. I’d sign up. But how do you figure that me doing all of your work is worth 10k? I can charge a 20% hiring fee and make some of that back, but that’s not a good deal compared to 10k in my pocket. And, I’ll point out that your lack of ready funds for this deal shouldn’t be my problem.”

Bob nodded. “I’d go for 30%, and I know how many of your friends are going to make 2k a day, but let's not quibble. The big bonus is you’re there, on-site when they start hiring. I’ve confirmed two things: Long-term jobs, and you work out of the new MK7 pods that have full medical. Spend a month in one, and you’ll come out better than you went in.”

Ozzy leaned back in his chair. The information from Bob matched what his gentlemen adventurers had let drop. And if it was true? He had good friends who could benefit from a steady paycheck and full medical—one in particular.

“Tell me more. What are we talking about when you say long-term.”
Too many jobs paid well but were a small fraction of the week. Eight hours here, four hours there, and overall, adding up to not enough. You were always hustling to line up the next jobs. His own weekend job was one of the best anyone had these days.”

“It’s going to sound crazy, but everything I’ve heard adds up to contracts longer than a year, with deep dives into the game and nearly no time out of it.”

Ozzy nodded slowly.

“Fine. I’m in. Send the information I’ll need to get us in on the first job. Keep the 10k and watch Exelon close; it’s going to dump to sub-twenty, and you need to buy immediately. It will bounce back when it hits seventeen.”

Bob smiled, and they shook hands. “One more thing, you promised last time to tell me why they call you the Butcher of Barcelona.”

Ozzy laughed, “Because I used to cut the meat on a VR cook-what-you-shootshow. This was back when the game had full AI support, of course. It all tastes the same now. They dragged in the animals they’d hunted down, and I turned them into cutlets, steaks, roasts, and chops for the chefs to create masterpieces. I got damned handy with a cleaver.”

Chapter 2

Done with his main job playing the butler in a VR adventure and his side job selling information he skimmed from his client's conversation, Ozzy logged out for the day and slowly woke up inside his rented pod. His heart rate sped up and returned to normal, and he became aware of his body again. He knew better than to open the pod and get out too fast. First, he stretched out his sore muscles and gave himself another two minutes to steady his breathing. He’d pulled a triple shift and spent thirty-six hours in the pod and his body needed time to adjust properly before getting out. When he was ready, the pod rotated to seventy-five degrees, and he opened the door of the pod and carefully stepped out. He’d done this too many times before and wanted to avoid the muscle cramps and hang-over effect of being in a pod too long.

Still groggy, he walked over to the small cafeteria. The pickings were meager today. Besides the ever-present chicken-flavored food cubes, the bio-bars made from kelp and soybeans, and nutrient shakes, the cafeteria had two specials today. The first was a slab of microwaved ‘You won’t believe it’s not meat’ and a flask of Bludgeon Brew. Ozzy grabbed a bio-bar and an energy drink from the cooler and sat at a large table where he saw two friends eating.

Ben was smiling as he made a production of carving his slab of pseudo-meat into thin slices and dipping them in sauces he squeezed from small plastic packets. Soy sauce and mustard packets were expensive, but Ben liked his food with a bit of flavor.

Rolly, on the other hand, was doing his best to choke down the food cubes and complaining. “I mean, chicken? Everything is chicken-flavored. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten real chicken to know the difference, but half the food I eat is chicken-flavored.”

Ben quirked an eyebrow at him. “Then why do you always order the food cubes? You could be dining on tasteless, plastic meat-like substances like I’m enjoying today.”

Rolly grumbled again. “And be hungry again in two hours. I looked at the nutritional values of all this crap. Food cubes are meant to keep someone alive and have the most calories and nutrients in them.
Bio-bars aren’t bad, but they take a lot of chewing, and I can’t afford to chip a tooth.”

Ozzy was looking around the cafeteria. This was the end of the month for this facility. They shut down for twenty-four hours while cleaning and repairs were done to the pods. If you were still in a pod now, you were staying in for a full day on a long-term job.

“Where’s Suzette? She should have been off by now.”

Ben was looking around as well now. Rolly scanned the room quickly. “She isn’t here, and they lock the doors in twelve minutes.”

The three men got up and walked back to the pod room, intercepted by Richie. Richie was the on-site representative of PodsAmerica, part of Technodyne. “Sorry, gentlemen. Shut down is soon, can’t let you in.”

Ozzy kept walking. “Suzette isn’t out, and I know her shift is over. Where is she, Richie?”

Richie went to argue more and didn’t notice Ben grabbing the data pad off his belt and tossing it to Rolly. Rolly flipped through the pages, glad that Richie never locked his pad. He tucked it into the back of his pants. “I think she said she was in Room 3, Row 17, Column 5. We should check her pod. Coming with us, Dick?” Ben and Rolly each grabbed one of Richie’s arms and pulled him along as Ozzy ran ahead. They heard a rhythmic banging coming from Room 3.

As Ozzy found the pod, a dainty foot kicked the transparent plastic lid of the pod one more time, breaking part of it around the latch and flinging the lid open. Suzette tumbled out, screaming. She wiped her face and faced Richie. “You asshole! I told you the latch was sticking, and you promised to have it fixed. I was locked in that pod.”  

She took two steps toward him, but Ozzy caught her. “Easy, easy. He’ll be happy if you hit him. He can file assault charges.”

Richie shook free of the two men. “I’m filing charges anyway. She damaged company property.”

“So I could get out of a pod that was cycling down. I’d have been trapped in a dead pod until maintenance got to me, and we know you don’t bother with fixing things. You barely clean anymore.”

Richie was nervous but stubborn. He was great at his job, toeing the company line and ignoring the obvious. “You can’t prove that!”

Rolly had the data pad out again. “She doesn’t have to. It’s all here in the logs. Several people have filed complaints about that pod. Strangely, the complaints are all in a file labeled ‘Delete at end of month’. How strange. But I can fix it for you, Richie. I’m sending them all off to your boss right now, along with a complaint about the tech guys never fixing anything, and I popped the complaints into their queue where they should have been. You also mention the small damage, hold Suzette blameless, and offer her a free eight-hour session to make up for it. That will look good on your record. A free session is cheap compared to a lawsuit over an accidental death.” He tossed the datapad back to Richie.

Richie’s face was getting red. “You…”

Ben smiled. “Say thank you, Richie, and move on. No harm done, Suzette will be fine, your job is fine, and Ozzy didn’t break your legs. It all works out.”

Richie shrugged. He didn’t care about much at all in life. “Sure. Thank you. I guess. Now, can we go before we’re all locked in here for a day, and I have to be someone to let us out?”

The four exited their workplace and ascended sixteen flights of stairs to their apartments on the residential floors of the North Philadelphia habitat. Most families of eight or fewer people lived in medium apartments. Small apartments were for couples with less than five children, and larger apartments (if ever available) housed extended families of up to twenty people. Somehow, Suzette had found a large apartment for lease twenty years ago and worked a deal with the leasing agent to acquire it. The four of them lived together, each with their own 10’x10’ room. An unheard-of luxury in the habitat. This was only possible because all four of them worked any job they could get in the VR world, and Suzette made a payment each month to the leasing agent.

They all collapsed as they got to the apartment. Ozzy looked at Suzette; she still looked mad. “Are you ok?”

“No, I’m pissed for trusting Richie. But he lied to my face that the latch was fixed when I saw my pod assignment, and there wasn’t time to get moved to another pod. I couldn’t miss this job. Too important. I’ve been working a job as a waitress at a private restaurant run by Alchemarx. You can guess the role: Skimpy black lace outfit, serving drinks to old men who wear handsome avatars and pick at their high-priced yet tasteless food while a real orchestra plays off to the side. It pays well, but this week was different. All they could talk about was their plans for the next-level gaming platform that was launching.
A small number of corporations are going to beta-testing the systems, and there’s some sort of competition between them. They were making plans to shift the restaurant to it and claiming the food would taste as good as the real world, but with a catch: It all has to be prepared like in the real world. That’s going to need chefs, butchers, vintners, …everything. We need to find out more.”

Ozzy was smiling. “Excellent. That means I didn’t spend ten thousand credits on bad information.”

That shocked Ben. “Since when are you paying for info? You sell it. Something must have tempted you.”

“I have a weekend job lined up. There are two stages to it. First, we need a team of twenty-five people who can run a kitchen and dining room to produce three-star food or better. The second stage is getting that team hired for jobs in the new game.”

“The first sounds great, but It sounds like you’re aiming at the second.”

Ozzy nodded. “Solid employment, not these little side gigs. Decent pay, full AI-assisted immersion, just like it used to be. And the cherry on top? Mark7 pods, the type that comes with full medical.”

Ben took a deep breath and exhaled. “I would love to be able to walk those stairs without pain in my knees.”

Rolly grinned. “Full AI? Damn. I loved the food in the old games, and the pets I tamed actually had personalities. I’m in.”

Suzette looked at Ozzy and simply nodded. Full medical would literally be a lifesaver for her. The cost of her meds was going up each year, and the twenty years of treatments guaranteed by the lawsuit were almost up. “I’m in.”

Ozzy looked at them. “We need to put a team together. It has to be people we know and can work with. Stay away from the prima donna type. Half of them need to be kitchen people, but we can branch out from there as long as they can serve and wait tables or clean. And they have to be able to get to one of these locations. There are over a hundred places in the world where they can gain access to the Mark7 pods that are used for the event. I’ll set up the reservations once we confirm who we can get.”

Ben started to make a list on his old laptop. “If it’s kitchen work, we need Betty. No one can organize a staff like she can, and she’s a whiz at traditional recipes.”

Rolly agreed. He liked Betty and could eat her food for days on end. “Get John and Cham as her assistants. They’re hard workers and follow orders well. She’ll need two gophers. In fact, put me in charge of the fire brigade. I’ll take five people, and we’ll assist Betty and handle any cleaning, moving, or grunt work.”

Suzette was adding names on her datapad to Ben's list. “Georges knows wine and brandy, and if the second phase has any building involved, I’d want him on the team. He has several degrees in engineering and ancient history. It’s a shame the only jobs he can get are online. And his daughter, Miriam, works with him often. She’s a metallurgist and has blacksmithing and silversmithing skills.”

The night wore on, and by morning, Ozzy had his team together. By unanimous consent, they took the next day off and got some real rest for the first time in months.