by Matt Ruff
Mr. Jones, impatient as ever, is already marching into the darkness. Jolene hefts her nine iron and starts to follow him, but I stop her and say, “You and Ray wait here.”
“Excuse me?”
“Just do it,” I say. “Please?” She frowns but doesn’t argue. Neither does Ray, who I think at this point would be just as happy to get killed off.
I run to catch up with Mr. Jones. We are in the middle of the tunnel when the first Zed come shambling out of the dark. They are few in number and they are slow movers, so it would be easy enough to just dodge around them, but I choose to deliberately fall into the game designers’ trap and fire my pistol. The gunshot echoes loudly in the tunnel, and as the echo fades I hear the crash of a metal door slamming open, followed by a chorus of growls.
We are close enough now to see that the hazard lights belong to a white airport security jeep that is sitting with its front doors open. On the other side of the road is a sedan that has been flipped onto its roof. The guys in the jeep must have stopped to investigate the wreck, and you can guess what happened next.
Sure enough, as Mr. Jones goes to climb in the jeep, he is ambushed by a Zed in a tattered security uniform. While he’s busy shooting it, I step past him and slip behind the wheel. The jeep’s keys are in the ignition and the motor starts on the first try. “I will drive,” Mr. Jones says, but instead of sliding over I pull the driver’s door shut and motion for him to go around. This gets him glaring again, but the rest of the Zed are almost on us.
“What about the other two?” Mr. Jones asks, as he climbs into the passenger seat. I look up at the rearview mirror. The mob of approaching Zed must number in the dozens now, and they are jammed shoulder to shoulder, snarling furiously. I doubt even Darla could break through that with only a golf club for a weapon.
“Don’t worry, they’ll catch up to us,” I say. Then I step on the gas.
THE ROAD CURVES LEFT AND UP. AS WE REJOIN THE THRUWAY, I brace for more gunshots, but it seems we are out of sniper range.
I get a terse instant message from Jolene: WTF???
LATER, I reply.
The rain comes back with a vengeance. I put on the windshield wipers. Downtown Pyongyang still has power and the skyline remains hazily visible through the deluge, but it doesn’t seem to be getting any closer. The blacked out landscape around us, as revealed by intermittent lightning flashes, is a mix of open farmland and concentrated apartment housing. The monorail line is on our right, running roughly parallel to the road, which confirms that we’re going in the right direction—not that we actually have a choice. “The rally point can’t be far,” I tell Mr. Jones, but he only grunts impatiently, so I give the jeep more gas.
I get another instant message:
INTRUSION DETECTED — SECURICAM/A1
When I was searching my apartment this morning, something I found, in addition to my old Companion Cube, was the nannycam I bought for my previous apartment when I thought one of my roommates was stealing from me. It occurred to me that it might be useful to get footage of Ms. Pang’s white guy if he came back, so before I left I set the camera up and programmed the motion sensor to send me alerts.
Keeping one eye on the road, I open a pop-up window and check out the video feed. It’s not Ms. Pang’s white guy. The three people in my apartment—two men and a woman—are all Asian. I want to say Korean, though they could be Chinese. Agewise I’d guess they’re in their late twenties, though the tougher-looking of the two guys could be older.
Thanks to my thousands of hours of experience in first-person shooters, I have a much easier time IDing their guns. The tougher-looking guy is holding a 92 series Beretta semiautomatic, the default handgun for Hong Kong movie gangsters. The woman is armed with a Beretta 21A pocket pistol that has been fitted with a silencer—a common accessory in video games and films, but one that I’ve never actually seen on a real concealed-carry weapon. Staring at it, I think: WTF???
“Look out!” Mr. Jones says. A makeshift barricade of sandbags and concertina wire stretches across the road in front of us. Even if I weren’t distracted, there’s not enough time to avoid a collision, so instead of slamming on the brakes I just try to steer through the crash. This works for a few seconds but then the tires blow and we go into an uncontrolled skid.
The jeep comes to a stop with its front bumper and grill wrapped around a lamppost. The motor is dead but the headlights are somehow still working, so I can see the sign hanging askew from the post. MONORAIL STATION 0.6 KM, it reads. I try the ignition and confirm we’ll be walking.
We climb out of the jeep and a series of closely timed lightning flashes gives us a sense of our surroundings. We’ve entered one of the suburban housing complexes, the thruway now a boulevard with rows of identical six-story apartment buildings lining either side. Behind us at the wrecked barricade I spot the remains of a blown-up machine-gun nest with uniformed bodies scattered around it.
Another sniper opens up with an automatic rifle from the other end of the street. I take cover behind the jeep. Mr. Jones ducks down beside me, but not before firing a long burst from his submachine gun.
“Hey,” I remind him, “careful with your ammo!”
“Sorry!” he replies, sounding uncharacteristically abashed. Then he says: “The shooter is in a third-floor balcony about forty meters away.”
“Stay here.” I crawl around to the back of the jeep and peek out carefully. I quickly spot the shooter, and I also see how I’m supposed to deal with him. Parked on the sidewalk almost directly beneath the balcony is a military supply truck. Its tailgate is open, and lying beside it are two more dead soldiers who must have gotten shot as they were about to unload the truck’s cargo: big red steel drums with flame icons on their sides.
Why would the North Korean Army be unloading barrels of fuel in the middle of a housing complex during a zombie apocalypse/terrorist uprising? Don’t ask me, I just work here. I draw my pistol and wait for the next lightning flash. It’s a long shot and my first bullet goes wide, but the second is dead-on, and the fuel is as volatile as nitroglycerin. The whole truck goes up, sending a huge gout of flame up the side of the building; the sniper is caught in it and dies screaming.
I salvage a grenade from one of the dead soldiers by the barricade. Mr. Jones and I proceed along the boulevard, the now-blazing apartment building lighting our way. We go about three hundred meters before our progress is blocked by a pair of buses parked nose-to-nose across the road. In real life this would be a surmountable obstacle, but the game won’t allow me to give Mr. Jones’s avatar a boost, or let me climb on his shoulders.
We are forced to detour into a small plaza to our left. At the center of the plaza, a life-sized portrait of Kim Jong-un has been placed atop a concrete pedestal. The pedestal is ringed by brightly burning torches, so despite the blackout and the storm, the Supreme Leader is clearly visible, a beacon of Juche strength in the darkness. At his first sight of it, Mr. Jones does a funny little dip, almost like he’s genuflecting.
My own attention is focused on the edges of the plaza. I look for an open alley or a breezeway but don’t find one; the surrounding buildings form a solid wall, and the doorways are all blocked with piles of sandbags. It’s a dead end.
“How do we get to the station?” Mr. Jones asks.
I shake my head. “We don’t. Not yet. Something has to happen first.”
“I do not understand.”
I approach the Kim Jong-un shrine and check out one of the torches. It’s cast bronze, about three feet long, the flame fueled by a reservoir in the handle. I lift it from its sconce and swing it experimentally; it should make a decent club.
Growls echo from the direction of the boulevard. Mr. Jones and I turn to see the zombified citizens of Pyongyang emerging from the shadows. Whatever their social rank in life, they are members of the Hostile Class now, starving and eager to feast on our entrails. Mr. Jones tenses up and raises his weapon.
“Single shots to the head,” I re
mind him.
“Yes, I understand,” he says, nodding.
There are fifteen Zed in the first wave. Mr. Jones shoots ten of them; I shoot one and use the torch to bash out the brains of the other four. I load a fresh clip into my pistol and do a quick spin around to make sure there aren’t more zombies sneaking up behind us.
I spot a lone figure standing on the far side of the shrine, but it’s not one of the Zed. It’s Ms. Pang. She is dressed all in black with a Red Wolf bandanna tied beneath her chin. She locks eyes with me and puts a finger to her lips.
“More of them!” Mr. Jones cries, still looking towards the boulevard.
The second wave is massive, more Zed than I can count. Mr. Jones is soon out of ammo; I toss him the torch and grab another for myself. We fight the mob hand to hand and are nearly overwhelmed. In desperation I use the grenade, taking out a dozen zombies at once and nearly killing us in the bargain. This buys us a moment’s rest but it isn’t enough; we can hear more of them coming.
Something big slams into the bus barricade. We hear a monstrous roar, and the growls of the Zed abruptly fall silent. One of the buses slides forward as the new arrival makes an opening for itself. Lightning flashes as it breaks through.
It’s some kind of mutant Zed, grown to troll-like proportions. The sight of it makes me regret having used up my grenade, but there’s no point crying about that now. I slam my last clip into my pistol and open fire on the monster. I can tell I hit it in the head because I see bits of skull flying off it, but this only seems to piss it off. Then my gun is empty, and the Zed pounds its knuckles on the ground and roars again.
Mr. Jones roars too—a kind of Rebel yell, the loudest sound I’ve ever heard him make—and charges the beast with his torch. The Zed swipes at him with both fists, but Mr. Jones dodges the blows and brings the torch down like a sledgehammer on the top of the Zed’s skull, once, twice, three times. The monster’s head comes apart and its body crashes to the ground, even as Mr. Jones continues to pound on it. He hits it until he is certain it’s not getting up again, and then he hits it some more.
“Good job,” I say, when he’s finally finished. I say this not to praise him—although I am pretty impressed—but because Ms. Pang is walking up behind him now, and I want him to look at me instead of her. But he doesn’t look at either of us, just stands there catching his breath.
Then Ms. Pang is right on top of him. She raises a hand, and I see blue sparks dancing over her palm and her fingers. This is a fairly cheesy visual effect—the kind of thing an amateur might whip up at home—but whatever computer process it signifies appears to be more sophisticated. Mr. Jones grunts and stiffens up, and his avatar turns one hundred and eighty degrees, rotating as if he were standing on a turntable. Ms. Pang shoves her hand into his face and the sparks wrap around his skull, for a moment seeming to form an almost solid band, like a VR headset made of lightning. Then the sparks go out and she draws her hand back. Mr. Jones’s avatar is now frozen, just like Anja’s avatar was frozen. Ms. Pang thrusts her hand forward again, and erases Mr. Jones’s head.
“Excellent,” she says. She turns to me smiling. “Well played, John Chu. You did not disappoint me.”
Somehow I don’t hear this as good news. “What did you just do?”
“A good question,” says Ms. Pang. “The answer depends on how clever Smith is. But with a bit of good fortune, you will hear about it on the news very shortly. In the meantime—”
The rest of her words are drowned out by a sudden whine of static in my headphones. I start lagging like crazy, my visuals breaking up into a stuttering series of still images shot through with junk pixels. Whatever this is must be affecting my avatar as well, because right before I disconnect I hear a quizzical “John Ch-ch-ch-chu?” break through the static. Then my goggles go dark. The static drops to a hum, then nothing.
I spend a long moment in the silent void waiting to see if the words ACCOUNT TERMINATED will appear. They don’t. But even without that confirmation, I can tell I’m down another name.
THERE’S A COMMON SCI-FI MOVIE TROPE WHERE A CHARACTER thinks they’ve logged out of virtual reality, only to discover later that they’ve been tricked: They’re still in the simulation. It’s a believable scenario, because all of us have experienced something like this, in dreams. But when it comes to VR, the technology isn’t quite there yet.
As I pull off my headset, I can smell something burning, and since I haven’t bought any new Japanese sex toys, I know this must be real life. The Venetian blinds on the motel room window are drawn, but enough light is coming through the slats that I can see my computer on the dresser in front of me; it’s not actually on fire, but when I pick it up the case is warm, and the glow of fried components is visible through the air vents on the back.
It’s not just my game rig that’s dead. The alarm clock and the lamp on the nightstand are both out, and when I flip the wall switch for the overhead lights, nothing happens.
I go to the window and peek out through the slats. It’s evening and the sun has just set. The motel parking lot looks empty—no pistol-packing mystery Asians lying in wait. But when I step outside, there’s a shoebox sitting on the doormat with my name written on the lid.
As I’m staring at the shoebox, the door to the motel room on my left opens and a shirtless white guy with dreads and a scraggly beard stumbles out. “Hey,” he says, throwing me a confused look, “did you just lose power?”
I nod. We both turn and look at the Texaco station across the street, which is lit up and open for business. The streetlight on the corner is still working, too. “Weird,” says the white guy.
Not really, I think. I’ve spent enough time browsing griefer forums to know there are lots of ways to cause a localized blackout, if that’s your thing. For example, if you wire a Taser to an extension cord and plug it into a wall socket, you can melt down a building’s electrical system as effectively as you can a human nervous system. I doubt that Ms. Pang’s enforcer is to blame in this case, but here in America, where electroshock weapons are covered by the second amendment, he’s not the only one with access to Tasers.
A phone starts ringing in the shoebox at my feet. The dreadlocked white guy, helpful as any NPC, nods at the box and says, “Sounds like you got a call.”
“Thanks,” I say. I take the shoebox back into my room and set it on the bed and open it. The smartphone inside is a Xiaomi 2035, a Chinese brand that according to my research is very popular in North Korea. Its screen reads: SMITH CALLING.
I pick it up and answer it. “How did you find me?”
“You have more important things to worry about,” Smith says.
“Look, I don’t know what just happened, but—”
“Don’t you? Your confederate—who I believe to be an agent of the People’s Republic of China—just tried to assassinate my boss.”
“Assassinate?” I say. “What is this, The Matrix? You can’t kill someone by—”
“I knew you were a security risk,” Smith says. “My error was assuming that the danger was purely informational. I did not expect a physical threat.”
“What physical threat?” Remembering the light show in the game: “Did something happen to Mr. Jones’s VR headset?”
“As if you did not already know. You can be sure we will be looking much more closely at our foreign hardware sourcing, going forward.”
“Is Jones all right?”
“Yes, he is quite well. Fortunately, we detected your confederate’s incursion into our system, and as a precaution I had one of my own agents take over for Mr. Jones in the game. That agent will be honored as a hero.”
I step to the window and scan the parking lot again. “Look, I don’t know if you’re bullshitting me here,” I say, “but I don’t know anything about a plot against Mr. Jones’s life.”
“You are not working for the PRC?”
“I was working for someone else. She calls herself Ms. Pang, and she could be PRC. But she wasn’t just
paying me, she was threatening me.”
“Ah,” Smith says. “‘Carrot and stick,’ is that the expression?”
“Yes.”
“Well, John Chu, I have no more carrots for you. Your contract with Mr. Jones is terminated. You will receive no more money—but you will perform one last service. Do you see the envelope in the box I left for you?”
Nestled in the bottom of the shoebox is another, smaller box, rectangular and relatively flat. Resting on top of it is a letter-size envelope. The envelope contains a train ticket, a coach seat on tomorrow morning’s Amtrak Coast Starlight to Los Angeles. “You want me to go to L.A.? What for?”
“You will find out when you get there.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I do,” Smith says. “There is a message with a video attachment on this phone’s email app. Open it now and watch it.”
The video clip is from the feed of another nannycam that is focused on a long white medical pod. The head of the pod’s occupant is enclosed in a special VR helmet, so I cannot see her face, but on the wall behind the pod are several shelves full of trophies, and a big poster of Anja performing at the Pan American Games.
A red light flashes on the side of the medical pod, and a robotic voice begins shouting: “Achtung! Systemfehler!” Within seconds, a woman I recognize as Anja’s mother runs into view. She goes to a computer terminal near the foot of the pod, but even as she reaches it, the alarm ceases. Anja’s mom snatches up a headset from beside the terminal and puts it on. “Anja?” I hear her say. “Alles OK mit dir?” She pauses to listen and then continues talking; by the time Anja’s father appears, she is calmer. “Falscher Alarm,” she tells him.
“Do we have an understanding now?” Smith says when I get back on the phone.
“You hacked Anja’s iron lung.”
“No, John Chu—you did. But so we are clear, if you force me to terminate her life support, there will be no alarm to warn her parents.”
“OK,” I say. “I understand the rules.”