I’ve got a lot of questions regarding all those stats. I was warned about them, warned they were coming and not to freak out, to give it time, to let it become me. It’s obviously like a game, and any game has rules that need to be figured out if you want to survive and prosper in it. And if it’s kind of a game that will keep my mind occupied, that might just be the best thing I can do.

But all those stats can wait, wait when I have a free moment.

Right now, I just need to move away from this murdering gang. No way to know when they will regain their memories and when carnage will start.

I look over them again.

There is Lertin. You would guess, being one of the biggest VR drug lords in the Federation, he would have a propensity to take a charge. But no. He looks suddenly so old and fragile, and with his eyes, he begs others to explain to him what is going on.

Only humans here. That upsets me a bit. Quite a bit. I made a demand before I accepted their offer, demanded Er’Cron come with me. Orxian or not, he became a decent friend, a cellmate that kept my back safe for a long time now. Can not even recall all the times that he saved my hide or I his. And, here in a new, strange world, he is a partner I desperately need now.

That much for the DSTrans Company and their promises.

I guess I’m in this alone.

Now, I need to see what I came here with. Comfortable leather boots, thick and rough, dark brown cotton pants, a shirt underneath a wool swather, and a long dark poncho instead of a coat. I find the pockets in my pants all empty as the snowflakes hit my forehead harder.

How will I start a fire for tonight? The sky looks menacing enough, and the night will certainly be cold enough to freeze.

I move around a bit and see a pile of rucksacks next to a tree fifty yards away. Must be left there for us.

If I run to it, the others will notice, and, like cattle, they’ll all rush to the rucksacks, and the mayhem is certain to follow. So, I stroll around, trying not to draw any attention, looking at confused people, shrugging my shoulders on their inquisitive questions, playing a dumb smile on my face, and pretending not to pay any attention to the pile that I’m just slowly approaching.

I look at them closer once they are within my hand’s reach. They all look the same. The first one I open has a woolen blanket, a leather canteen of about a liter and a half, seems full with water or whatever, and a pair of flintstones. No knives, or weapons of any kind. I guess that’s my survival kit.

“Hey, are those for us?” someone very smart from behind me asks a question. Funnier still, nobody knows to answer it. But they start moving in.

I lift my head up to see Banzen ransacking rucksacks a few steps away from me. The inside of what he threw out seems to be identical to what I found in the mine, so I safely conclude they all must be the same.

“Hey, that one is taking two of them!” the smart one from behind me announces in an alarming voice, and I see Banzen caught with a hand in a cookie jar.

“That’s not fair!” I yell and point a finger at him. “There should be only one for each!”

They move on him instantly, circling him.

“That’s not fair!” Big Garden repeats my words like a mantra, then shoves him from behind hard enough that he flies two meters away.

“Hey, there’s plenty for everyone. I just wanted to see,” Banzen said, but everyone can see he has three blankets already stashed in his rucksack and two water skins over his shoulder.

“Ain’t right to steal. Stealing is not nice from your friends,” I say out loud

“Stealing is not nice!” Pick repeats it and pushes Banzen back in Big Garden’s direction.

The big man catches him as if he was a ball, then moves him a foot in front of him and slams him with his fist in the nose so hard that Banzen flies off his feet to the ground.

We all heard the nose bones crack, all saw the blood that sprayed the ground, and heard his pain-filled shriek.

You’d think that would satisfy them, especially since their brains must have been wiped clean. You’d think wrong. Marcos hits him with his leg as Banzen tries to lift his hand up. The others follow. They stamp on him as if he was a demon who came to steal their souls.

Bye, bye, Banzen, I think to myself as I slowly move away from the blood-frenzied pack.

“Nobody steals in here!” Big Garden announces, I guess proclaiming himself as a leader.

“Well, I guess, we have an extra now,” Pick adds as he takes water skins from the bloodied corpse.

It seems the violence does not disturb them very much and seconds later as I make to the first line of trees, I see they have all but forgotten about killing Banzen, as if he was just a bug to be squashed, each rushing to get their own little traveling packages.

“We are better off staying together, figuring this one out together,” the voice of Big Garden ecos behind me as I make it through the undergrowth. “So nobody leaves! You get that! We are better off together.”

Yeah, right. Better for who? Banzen would have something to say to that. I

“A big guy said not to leave,” Xernig, an ex-enforcer for a Rostoc mob comes out of behind the tree to stand in my path. He’s got only one eye, the other one losing on the occasion when once I punched him so hard it popped out. For a long time, he was looking for a chance to kill me. One among the rest. If he only remembered. He would not have wasted words on talking.

“And I think it would be wise to listen to him,” he continues to speak in a slow, threatening voice.

“Well, then, you go and listen to him,” I tell him and step forward.

I pass next to him, bump him in the shoulder, and he reaches to hold me, opens his mouth to call the others, or whatever. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I promised him way back I’d finish taking his head off if he ever even so much as look my way. And I like to keep my promises every now and then.

So I grab the hand that he tried to put on my shoulder and twist it violently, putting the lever of my whole body in it. It cracks and he is ready to scream in pain, but my hand wraps as a python around his neck. And then I just snap it.

It would have been harder not to have killed him, I think as I gently lay his dead body to the ground.

Maybe I’m lucky to remember. Maybe I’m just a killer, and as long as I’m busy with the killings, I get to think about nothing else.

Status Update:

Strength

The blue screen has auto-activated itself and is flashing something at me, but I stop it by saying, “Not now,” as I pick a small goat trail and move up the hill, away from the drop zone, and my dear beloved friends.

But I don’t cross twenty steps when I notice another fella waiting for me, suddenly coming from behind a tall pine tree, about twenty feet up the slope, a rucksack of his own thrown over his shoulder. How he beat me up the hill already, I have no idea.

“You seem to know what is going on,” he tells me in a calm voice as I approach him. “Care to share it with me?” he asks me, his eyes never blinking or leaving mine.

I sigh. I never had a problem with Zan. Back in the penitentiary, he is one of the rare guys who kept to himself. He’s thin, almost two heads smaller than my six-feet-six frame, Asian-origin, almost a baby-face-like. One would think of him as being easy prey. But I’ve seen him kill a person who thought exactly along those lines by some very slick leg kick to a head. Once I had a chance to ride a mule, and I don’t think that animal kicked any harder than this little fella did.

I sigh again. Really have nothing against him. He is the rare guy who was even more isolated than I. At least I had fury Er’Cron. He had nobody for all I know.

His cold eyes follow every twitch on my face, trying to read my thoughts even before I have them.

“I ain’t going to lie to you-” I stop myself, not ready to reveal his name. “I have not talked to you before, don’t have a problem with you. But have no reason to trust you either. Even less reason to trust all those people there. Whoever they think they are, I don’t want any part of it. So, I’m going on my own. Don’t get in my way, and we won’t have a problem. Okay?”

For anyone with half a brain, I said plenty. His eyes blink, and he nods his head. “I won’t get in your way,” he says and steps aside to let me pass. “Mind if I drag along?”

“Something tells me this is a free country. Can go anywhere your little heart desires,” I answer him in a relaxed, casual voice, but I feel not good at all for a killer like Zn to be walking from a striking distance behind me. It’s like having a deadly viper right behind your heels.

We move out further in the forest before anyone can tell we are gone.

Snow gets deeper fast. Suddenly, Zan pulls me by my left elbow and I turn around, ready to grab him under his kicking legs and throw him over a tree top. But he points at something in the snow, by the trail.

I follow his finger.

A footprint in the snow. Not human. A big circle followed by four smaller ones and some more marks on top of them. Bigger than my fist. “What do you think they are?” I ask him as I see him examine it very carefully.

“A predator,” he says.

“How do you know that?”

“You see those little long marks. They must be claws, and from the size of it, the claws the size of my little finger,” he says as he places his little finger to measure it. We move a bit to follow the track and found a whole mess of them. “Fresh, more than one. I would have guessed something like a mountain lion, but… for all that I remember, a mountain lion does not like company, and here… there’s a whole pack of them.”

Zan looks around, then picks a broken twig with hair on it and examines it. “Smells like… horrible. Could be something bigger than regular wolves, more than waist-high.“ This guy knows stuff.

“Must have been a tracker in your previous life,” I offer. “You’ve got good eyes and a sharp mind.”

He smirks and looks back at the group we left behind. “They don’t.”

We could hear them, their shouting, Big Garden, the biggest and dumbest of them trying to order people around. “We have to make a fire, a big one. Bring more branches, Just break them off the tree and pile it all on top. Have to be warm for a night. Build a big fire.”

“The tracks are fresh, no snowflakes in them. They are here,” he says and points to branches up to our left that suddenly moved.

We move instantly away, run up the track as fast as we can.

“Up the tree,” he says behind me and we run.

“Any tree!” he screams as the twigs behind us rustle and crackle.

I pick a thick pine tree with the lowest branch about eight feet from the ground. Then, as I run to it, I turn around to pick Zan to throw him up.

But he just jumps on me, hardly touching my extended hand with his boot as he flies up over a branch.

I hear growling noises from behind me, but I don’t turn around as I jump up, my foot bouncing off the tree trunk just like Zan bounced off my hands. I extend all I can, my hand going up, and I see, I’ll come short of a branch and fall down on my ass when Zan’s hand grabs mine. And I kick against the tree trunk some more, pushing myself up, not letting go of Zan’s hand till my other hand is not grabbing the branch, pulling my ass up.

“Must have been more than eight feet,” I tell myself not understanding how I could not make that branch with my jump. I look up and see Zan is already two branches above, and I decide to follow him.

Only when we were a few more branches up, we decide to stop and look down to the growling pack that was.

Bigger than wolves, almost lion size, a pack of six of them move around the tree, but can’t climb it. The size of their heads is bigger than mine. Their mad jaws are spitting foam and revealing teeth that are bigger than my thumbs. One snap of those, and you could call your arm, leg, or a head good-by.

They do not stay too long growling at us, but move swiftly off, somewhere to the right.

There, sitting on a high branch, hugging the tree, and overlooking the area, I have a chance to catch my breath and think.

I’m wondering why I could not jump so good. Did years wasted in jail made me that clumsy? Maybe a blue screen could explain it.

Another thought comes to bug me. Should I ask Zan about the blue screen, see if he has one of his own? No. Better to keep that to myself. What do I get to gain from asking? Would he know more than I do? Not likely. So, why do I want to be... just curious, I guess? Why when I know curiosity has killed too many cute kittens for it not to kill one ugly me.

So, with my deepest thoughts, I try to activate the screen.

Screen activate. Show me updates. Blue screen, are you there? Hello, anyone home?

Nothing. Maybe I need to speak it.

Then I remember. The command.

Show me my update, I ask without saying words out loud.

Update:

Physical

Strength Overall: Level 4

(arms, back, legs, chest, abdominal) Unavailable

Speed: Level 1

Endurance (calculated in stamina): Level 0

Agility: Level 0

Dexterity: Level 0

Mental:

Intelligence: Level 5

Wisdom: Level 1.5

Karma: -5 Killing a human (50 percent reduction of the penalty on the account of it attacking you)

+10 Helping save a human from wolverries attack.

'Okay, my karma is clear, but, why did my other numbers change?' I ask. 'Please, Explain my stats numbers.'

Your numbers will be adjusted as more data is available and processed.

Your decision to stay quiet and not tell anyone about your status has gained you +1 in Wisdom.

You were the second person to figure out that you need rucksacks, so you deserve only half a credit.

I see. I was the second one. It could only be Zan. I look up at him, but he is looking down the valley, not meeting my inquisitive stare.

“Should we let them know?” he askes me, without taking his eyes of our old crowd who now seem fighting to start a fire, unable to do so.

“Fuck ‘em,” I say and feel not a bit too bad about it. “Bad karma or not, let the wolverries have them and see what happens.”