Recruitment

by K A Riley

  “Nice,” Cardyn says.

  Rain gives him a wink. “Felt good.”

  We continue up the stairs to the top landing, down the metal walkway, and over to the office. That’s when our streak of luck or skill or whatever it is comes to an excruciating end. With no other way in, we try the doorknob. Brohn turns it and eases the door quietly open a few inches. The rest of us are crouched under the bank of windows lining the office. There’s no sound coming from inside, so Brohn opens the door the rest of the way. He’s greeted by a hail of gunfire that riddles his body with holes. At the same time, the rest of us are blasted away by a cluster of plasma grenades lobbed in our direction by the guards we didn’t see hiding just beyond the office.

  There’s no real pain, but the expectation of it is nearly as painful as the real thing. Fortunately, it hits hard but then vanishes in an instant.

  With a flash of white light, the game resets, and we’re back in the warehouse lobby.

  We make it back to the red staircase and up to the office only to be killed all over again the second we breach the room. We try different tactics: Karmine and Kella leading the way with a second wave of us close behind. The seven of us split up into two groups. Then split into three groups with two teams of two and one of three. Doesn’t matter. We all die. We can always get past the warehouse guards, up the stairs, past the guy on the landing, but there’s no way to enter the room with the hostages without getting killed. We try back ways and look for other ways to access the mezzanine level. We find a window-washer’s rig but no way to get it or ourselves back outside of the building. Once we’re in, we’re in for good. Until we die, that is. We try other things, too. The freight elevator is off-line. We inspect every inch around it, but there’s nothing. Not a seam or a hidden access panel. Nothing. It’s a closed program. Just us inside a big building filled with old vehicle parts, construction and transportation equipment, and the enemy. That gets us back to the staircase, our only way up to the mezzanine level.

  So we try a more strategic approach once we get to the office: me and Brohn darting in first to draw the enemy’s fire with Karmine and Kella flanking us a split-second later on one side while Cardyn, Rain, and Amaranthine lay down cover fire. Doesn’t work. We all die.

  We all rush in together, shouting and firing to disorient the enemy. Doesn’t do any good. We all die.

  We try removing the silencers from our weapons and luring the Order out of the office with loud gunfire.

  In some versions, they come out and kill us. In others, nothing happens, so we go in, and they kill us. We try bursting into the room in one screaming mass, but the Order kills the hostages in front of us before we die. In other versions, we’re able to make it to within ten or fifteen feet of the hostages before the Order takes us all down. In at least one version, the entire top floor of the building explodes and kills us all.

  Then the sim resets again. And over and over—I don’t know how many times. Whatever we do, we can’t get past this last batch of guards in the office. The hostages are right there. We can see them. We can even get most of the way across the room. But we can’t save them, we can’t defeat the Order, and we can’t seem to survive.

  Every time, we reset back in the front lobby of the warehouse. I don’t know how long we’ve been living as our avatars. I have to remind myself that my body, the real me, is reclining in a chair in the middle of the Epsilon Cube. The rest of my Conspiracy, too. Well, minus Terk. For now. The rest of us are all sitting there in a circle, our eyes staring into space at nothing, as these digital versions of us get blasted to pieces over and over and over again.

  Our physical status resets each time. We never get tired. But the mental fatigue is real. I feel every bit of the frustration of failure. Hiller’s warning about this sim not stopping until the mission’s been completed rings in my ears. I know the others are thinking about it, too. Could we be stuck in this loop of a no-win situation forever? Brohn tries to reassure us. He tells us not to worry. “Everything will be fine. We’ll figure this thing out,” he promises. It doesn’t matter that the words are coming from a computer-generated avatar. I can still detect the doubt in his voice from a mile away.

  I pull Brohn aside after our latest reset while the others are picking out their weapons. Their heads are down. There’s no joy anymore. Even Karmine and Kella have lost their gung-ho spirit. If we were soulless before, now even our avatar shells are running on empty.

  “What if there’s no end to this?” I whisper to Brohn. “I mean, forget training and forget the war. These are our friends. Our family. They’re going to go crazy if this keeps up much longer. And I don’t mean mildly crazy. I mean we’re all going to lose our minds. Literally.”

  Brohn puts his hand on my shoulder. “Remember back in the Valta when I said you were sensitive?” I give him a pouty frown, but he stops me with a pained smile. “I just wanted you to know that I don’t take it back. You really are the most sensitive person I know, and I love that about you. No matter what we’ve been through, your heart stays as big and as strong as ever. You really care about…us. And that means a lot to, well, me.” He nods over to where our dejected friends are mindlessly selecting their newest batch of weapons for another pointless foray into another unwinnable battle. Without waiting for us, they start to make their way into the warehouse. Again. To face more failure. Again.

  I start to follow them, but Brohn holds me back. “They may look to me as the leader, but you’re the one keeping us all together.”

  “Thanks,” I say, feeling myself blush pink with pride and then full-on red with embarrassment.

  “Hey,” he says, leaning in close. “We make a good team, don’t we? You and I, I mean.”

  I know it’s just a VR illusion, but I swear I can feel his breath on my neck.

  “Seems like you and Rain have become more of a team lately.” I don’t mean it to sound like an accusation, but I know it kind of does.

  “Rain’s great. But she’s all business.” He puts his VR hand on my VR face, and I swear I feel it as sure as if it was real. “You and I are—”

  He’s cut off by Amaranthine, who practically never talks but somehow manages to have the worst timing when she does finally decide to open her mouth.

  “Hey guys. I have an idea,” she says. “What if the Order thought the hostages had already been rescued?”

  Brohn drops his hand from my face, and we walk over to the others just as Rain is asking Manthy what she means.

  “Nothing,” Manthy says, pumping the brakes on her own idea. “Not really. I guess I haven’t thought it through…”

  Brohn and I both say, “Manthy!” at the same time. He steps toward her. “If you think you have something, if you think you may know a way out of this…”

  “Okay.” Her hands are folded in front of her. Her voice is barely audible, and she stares at the floor the entire time she talks. “Let’s say that the Order gets distracted. Hears an explosion or has to respond to an assault. When they look back at the hostages, they just aren’t there. When they leave to try to figure it out, they drop their guard. We swoop in, rescue the hostages, and we’re out before they know what’s going on.”

  “Sounds like a great plan. Only one problem. How the heck do we do all that?”

  Amaranthine finally glances up and smiles. She has a strange look I’ve never seen in her before. It’s almost…confidence. “We’re plugged into a VR system, right?”

  “Yes. So?”

  “You really haven’t been able to feel that?”

  “Feel what?”

  “The system. The energy. I thought I was imagining it at first. But it’s real. It’s not just being pumped into our synaptic systems. It goes the other way, too. The energy, I mean.”

  “I don’t feel anything,” Kella says with a frown.

  “Me neither,” Karmine adds. His avatar wiggles his fingers in front of his face.

  Amaranthine makes an odd sound I can’t place at first. But then I re
alize it’s a laugh, something I don’t think I’ve ever heard from her before. “You have to relax. It’s like being in water. Every move you make causes a reaction. You push the water away with one hand, more water swarms back at you. The VR system is like that. It’s not a closed-off, one-way road. It’s a mesh, a branching highway. We’re not trapped. Not really. Everything connects to everything else.”

  We’re all just staring at her. I know we’re asking ourselves the same thing: Has Manthy gone clever or crazy?

  Cardyn is shaking his head. He’s not a risk-taker or a think-outside-the-box kind of guy. But his eyes light up when I remind him about Render. “Card, you’ve known about me and Render longer than anyone. You didn’t want to believe that at first either, but you get it. What if Manthy’s on to something? What if this is the same thing?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “What if Manthy is tapping into Hiller’s VR somehow the way I have a connection with Render?”

  Now Card nods and smiles. “Right. I guess it’s technically possible. After all, the VR system is as plugged into us as we are into it.”

  Rain steps up next to Card and wags a finger approvingly at Amaranthine. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  “Hamlet,” I say. “Act one, scene five.” I raise my hand, and Rain gives me a stinging high-five.

  “Okay. Let’s say I buy this connection thing,” Brohn says. “How would it work? What do you feel, exactly? What can you actually do?”

  Amaranthine pauses and squints. “Um. Watch.”

  Before our eyes, her high-laced combat boots and her black tank-top and vest turn bright pink. She squints again, and her cargo pants blink into a pair of weathered blue jeans, torn and shredded at the knees.

  We all gasp and take a full step back.

  “Marvie,” Karmine says with an impressed exhalation.

  “How’d you…” Kella’s mouth hangs open. “I mean can anyone else…?”

  “I’ve kind of been practicing,” Amaranthine offers with a sheepish grin. “Just little changes here and there until I was pretty sure I could control it.”

  “And you think we can do this, too?” I ask.

  Amaranthine shrugs. It’s like she doesn’t know and really doesn’t care all that much. But she suggests we go ahead and try anyway.

  We do. We concentrate like Amaranthine tells us. We try to feel the energy flowing around us like water like she says. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t feel a thing. Up until now, we haven’t really felt anything other than that sudden blast of pain every time we’ve died in the simulation. How many times now? Dozens? A hundred? More? I’ve lost count.

  “Don’t worry,” Amaranthine says as her clothes shift back to combat black. “I know what to do. Just follow my lead.”

  Follow my lead? Three words I never thought I’d hear come out of anyone’s mouth but Brohn’s. But if she can get us out of this sim, I might even forgive her for interrupting what might have been my best moment ever with Brohn.

  How far we’ve come since Amaranthine was quietly bringing up the rear in the Valta as we piled onto the transport truck on the day of Recruitment.

  We follow Amaranthine through the warehouse. As always, we’re able to dispatch the assorted guards and the roving orange-clad squads of the Eastern Order. We make our way up the staircase. As always. We huddle around the office door. As always. Only this time, Amaranthine summons us away from the door and down the metal walkway to the banister just a few feet from the top of the stairs. We look out over the railing into the giant expanse of the warehouse. From up here, it looks tidy and harmless instead of chaotic and dangerous.

  “Just wait here,” she says.

  We do, and she clamps her hands on the railing and closes her eyes as we stand around, waiting to be discovered, shot, and reset to do it all again. But that’s not what happens. Instead, five members of the Order come storming out of the office. I know their faces well. They’ve killed me more times than I care to count.

  In a frenzy, they dash right past us like we aren’t even there. Karmine and Kella draw their weapons, but Amaranthine, her eyes still closed, shakes her head at them.

  The five men, guns gripped in their tight fists, storm down the stairs like they’re escaping from a burning building. By the time they get to the bottom, Amaranthine has opened her eyes and led us into the office where President Krug, his son, and the security detail are tied to metal chairs with a combination of thick ropes and metal chains. As always, they plead to us to help and point over to the thin white wires running from their temples to a deadly-looking battery off to the side. We’ve seen this before, too. We know that if we try to free the hostages, a monstrous electric current surges through the white wires and fries them into smoldering lumps of black carbon. We lose, get reset, and have to start all over again.

  Manthy says not to worry. As we watch, the ropes, chains, and wires pixilate away. The hostages stand when she tells them to. Then they follow her out the door with us in a cluster close behind. We all follow her down the stairs and back to the front lobby of the warehouse. We encounter every single member of the Order along the way. But they’re frozen in place. Harmless.

  In the lobby, while his son and security detail dematerialize, President Krug thanks us for our heroic efforts before disappearing as well.

  The lobby walls start to fade as Rain gives Manthy an enormous hug, which she resists as best she can. While the others gather around her to celebrate the end of the sim, we all start to fade along with the walls. Brohn’s avatar takes me by the sleeve. I can feel the program ending. My feet are pixilating away. Then my legs up to my knees.

  Brohn looks down at me. Twists my hair around his finger. The hand on my shoulder slides up to my neck, and his hand cups the back of my head. I don’t resist as he pulls me toward him. He leans down and, before I know it, our lips are together. His mouth is warm, and the kiss is soft and sweet.

  I know it’s not real. But I don’t care.

  20

  “Congratulations,” Hiller says as Granden and Trench scan the VR receptor’s contact modules out of our eyes and disconnect us from the chairs. “Your team set an all-time record for beating the sim.” The octopus arms retreat back into their ports in the ceiling leaving us to try to get our bearings after the final end of a traumatic VR experience.

  I look over at Brohn to see if his face shows any sign that he’s aware of what just happened between us. But he doesn’t look my way. Maybe he doesn’t know it happened. Maybe he’d already disconnected by the time we kissed, and I was the one controlling his avatar’s actions through some fantasy conjured by my mind.

  All I know is that I feel a strange combination of relief and regret. I pull my eyes away from his face, telling myself to forget it ever happened. It was probably nothing more than a dream.

  Karmine rubs his eyes and groans as he stands up. “What’s the record? Ten years? My entire body’s numb. Feels like I haven’t moved in…forever.”

  Kella stands as well. One at a time, she crosses her arms in front of her and stretches. “How many times did we die, anyway? A thousand? Forget ten years. Feels more like a hundred.”

  As we each stand and try to work feeling back into our numb bodies, Hiller walks around our circle of chairs, tapping her holo-pad and giving each of us a quick once-over inspection as she goes. “You were in the sim for just under four minutes,” she says without looking up from her glowing pad.

  “You’re kidding,” Cardyn says. And I know none of us can believe it either. It took nearly fifteen minutes just to get across the warehouse and over to the foot of the red staircase each time. And we must have done that hundreds, maybe thousands of times before Amaranthine did her amazing connection thing and broke the cycle to complete the mission.

  Forget the sensory deprivation of the treadmill room or even the odd sensation of living life over and over again as an avatar. The absence of
a standard measurement of time is the most disorienting feeling of them all. We’ve gone from time meaning everything as we counted down in dread to November 1st to time meaning nothing as Hiller and her team manipulate the very universe around us.

  Hiller consults some shifting graphs and diagrams over on one of the viz-screens and inputs some data with a few waves of her hand and a quick flurry of her fingers on a long keyboard that runs the length of the console. “I assure you, you performed admirably. Up to all hopes and beyond all expectations.”

  “Good to know,” Brohn says. He’s watching her like a hawk. I don’t think he trusts her even when she’s in the middle of complimenting us. Or maybe it’s because she’s in the middle of complimenting us.

  “What was the record before us?” Karmine asks. He’s ferociously competitive, even when it’s not really called for and no good can come of it. It’s not like the Recruits from the other Processors are here for him to impress.

  “Actually,” Granden interrupts, “four minutes isn’t just a record. You’re the only Cohort to ever successfully rescue the hostages.”

  “Really?” Karmine asks. He looks over at Hiller, who looks back over her shoulder at him. She nods before inputting some more data into her screen. “Marvie,” he gushes.

  The rest of us stand and continue our stretches in the space in front of the circle of eight chairs. I’m still worried about Terk and still a little freaked out at the sight of an empty eighth chair obviously meant for him. But it does feel good to have my body back along with my sense of time. I pull my knee up toward my chest, grateful at the warm flow of blood that runs through the tight muscles along the back of my leg.

  Hiller finishes with her screens and walks back over to us. She slips between two of the chairs and joins us in the area between as we continue to rub feeling back into our arms and legs. She walks around behind us, nodding her approval and inspecting each of us as she goes, surveying us one at a time and taking a mental picture of each us like a mother duck looking on proudly over her growing ducklings. She continues to input notes into a holo-board as she circles us, her fingers doing a little dance over the colorful pad in her hand.