Assassin's Creed: Outlaw - Book One

A Campfire Chat

I was in the forest. I was dressed as Yughi, I could feel the easy idling power of his body, trained to physical perfection, but I was still me.

"What's going on?" I asked. "I'm not back."

"No," Paul's voice emanated from the sky above me. "This is the test program. See if you can catch the target."

"What target?" I asked. I needn't have bothered, the sleek form of a young buck deer came bounding past me. It stretched its legs and hopped easily between the trees, swiftly outstripping me.

"Run then, I'll restart," Paul said.

The deer flickered out of existence, there was a crunch of breaking twigs behind me and there it went again. As soon as I registered the beast I gave chase, even as I did I considered the stupidity of the test. There was no way a man on foot was going to catch up to a deer in the forest.

"Keep up as long as you can," Paul said as if reading my mind. "It will help me fine tune the loop."

So I kept running, as expected the deer began to outstrip me. To my surprise, though, it wasn't the pure speed in which the deer beat me, it was the animal's sure-footed progress through the trees.

After a short distance, the deer reached the edge of a long ridge. It stopped, momentarily and looked about. Swiftly I ducked behind the trunk of a tree, trying to remain as still and silent as I possibly could.

I reached into my mind, trying to activate the eagle sense that Yughi had, to my surprise it worked. Everything seemed to become louder, more detailed, the gentle tug of the slight breeze on my skin started to feel like a thin liquid passing across my skin. I even thought that I could smell the deer up ahead, a smell like hot, salty skin, slightly acid with panic.

I risked putting my head out to get a bead on the deer. It was looking the other way, uncertain, suspicious. Having got my bearings I found I didn't actually need to be looking at the animal with my eyes.

I heard it pick its way carefully down the steep ridge. It began to walk slowly away from my position. It was unsure where I was but it was not yet confident that I had gone away.

I slipped from behind one tree to another, after repeating this run and stop behaviour four or five times I happened upon a thicket of broad branched bushes I could use for cover. I crouched down into this stalking zone, keeping my senses alert to the deer nearby.

Following the creature further into the forest. I stayed elevated on the ridge whilst it trotted carefully along the lower floor. Before long I heard the soft babble of running water. I expected the deer to stop and drink as we reached the small stream but it didn't, instead, it followed the stream into a high walled pass between two rocks.

I had to break cover to follow it into the miniature valley. I made do with crouching and staying as quiet as I could. I was so intent on my quarry that when it suddenly unravelled in a cloud of wheeling white vector lines I caught my breath.

Reminding myself that the deer was just an asset in a computer simulation I crept closer to the point where it had unexpectedly disintegrated. I could tell that there was something wrong here, this part of the simulation was not rendered quite the same way as the rest of the forest. It was as if this part was a graft hastily added into the training programme.

I debated whether I should continue, I looked behind me although I don't know what I expected to find. There were no clues as to how I should proceed. I supposed that if I were to ask a question out loud then Paul would hear it. For some reason, I didn't.

I crossed the disintegration point. Nothing happened to me except my ears popped. After they popped I could hear a low digital tone that rose and fell, sprinkled with the barely audible sound of digital pops and chimes. I imagined that this was some kind of base state for the animus poking through this hastily assembled annexe to the main simulation.