I don’t know, I guess maybe I was starting to feel like one of the team, so I piped up.
“You know,” I said “I worked for Immersiant—”
There it was.
I said I worked for Immersiant.
“It’s a company that makes sensory immersion systems,” I continued saying. “The civilian version. It’s nowhere as advanced though.”
“Oh yeah,” Warner said. “I heard about those. You play MMORPGs on those, don’t you?”
“Yeah, there’s going to be a lot of games for it coming out in the next few years.”
“What’s the launch title?”
“28 Dayz. I’m testing the alpha build.”
“What’s that about?”
“Oh, it’s a zombie survival crafting game, you get to level up your stats and build a base and all that.”
“Nice, that sounds like a lotta fun. I gotta get me one of those if I ever make it back home. You ever play Underworld?”
I was surprised. Warner was usually pretty tightlipped, but he opened up once we started connecting over games. I didn’t have him pegged as a gamer for whatever reason. We chatted about games for a bit. Once there was a lull in the conversation, my mind trailed off.
I thought a lot about how the hell I was gonna try to find Nyla. She always told me to just think things through one step at a time. One time, I was trying to code a sensory loop for the RealTwo. She walked over to me and asked me how I was doing. When I told her I was stuck, she walked me through the thinking process, asking me questions along the way. I still remember how she told me the story of how her dad, who was a sergeant in the Army, taught her that. Maybe I’ll tell you about that another time.
Anyway, as I started thinking about finding Nyla, her voice spoke to me.
Okay Wayne, say you find me, she said. Where am I going to be?
Well, I thought, the military took you, so…a military base?
Let’s say you get into the base. Let’s say you actually reach me. Then what?
You’re probably gonna be guarded. Or locked up, at least.
And how you’re you gonna get me out? What skills do you have? Do you have the skills you need?
I gulped.
Parkour…coding, I said.
And how is that gonna help you in this situation?
I guess I can out-maneuver them…
What obstacles are you going encounter?
They’re soldiers…they’re definitely gonna have guns. And possibly burners.
Will you have guns?
Yeah.
Do you know how to shoot?
…not so great, I guess.
So you need to know how to shoot. What happens after you shoot your way in?
I need to locate and find you.
Then what?
Then I need to get you to safety.
How will you do that?
Wherever you are, I’ll clear the path and lead you out.
Which way is out?
The way I came back in.
It went on this way for quite a while.
Soon enough, we’d all finished checking off all the boxes on our checklist, and it was time to get in there.
Elgin got her team strapped in.
“We usually have a tech who takes care of all this,” she said, “someone to keep watch on the vitals and make sure that everything’s running the way it should. Unfortunately, you’re coming in with us.”
The pores all over my head pricked with sweat. I needed time to sift through the system and try to find information that would tell me where Nyla was. Going into the simulation meant that I wouldn’t have time to do that.
“Wait, why?” I asked. “I thought you just needed me to make it so that you won’t die.”
Elgin shook her head. “We need all the help we can get. Your job is to make sure we stay alive, and I don’t trust that you can keep up with the logs. There’s no way for me to make sure that you’re hearing what I’m saying unless we’re in there together.”
She was right. STESIS wasn’t built for the admin to communicate with the users. I knew there was a way for them to send and receive messages, but there wasn’t any guarantee that the receiver would view it in time.
She continued saying, “More importantly, we’re probably going to need you to make adjustments on the fly. You’re going in.”
I didn’t have any choice in the matter. And either way, I needed to level up. Being in the simulation would improve my fitness a hundred times faster than without it. And I needed to learn as much as I could from them while I was in there—I needed to learn how to think like a soldier if I wanted to make sure Nyla got out safe from wherever it is that she was.
Everyone suited up and got into their sleds, and Elgin made sure everyone was strapped in before getting into her own sled. But actually, when I say strapped, there weren’t any actual straps. These machines were newer. The one that I used in Room 550 must’ve been an older version because the straps were secured with Velcro. These machines had these broad thick cuffs that clamped down instead. Elgin had taught me that in an emergency, there were quick release pins to disengage the clamps.
After everyone was lying in their sleds, Elgin injected them with the NPI. Then she motioned at me to come over to her sled.
“Listen,” she said. “You gotta strap me in, inject yourself, and get into your own sled. Once you do that—”
“Elgin,” I said, interrupting her softly with a nod. “I know what to do.”
Her eyes flitted up and down, scanning my face and assessing me.
She nodded.
“Wayne,” she said. “You’ve been doing a pretty good job. Thanks for wrangling the system for us.”
I smiled. She was a good leader. It felt good to be appreciated.
She continued.
“Warner’s got his left arm unstrapped,” she said. “It’s just in case something happens and he needs to get out. I’m leaving mine open, you should too. But I have to warn you…”
I raised an eyebrow, and she explained.
“If that NPI starts running out, you might experience some strange effects in the STE. It’s hard to explain, and we don’t have time, but just let me know if weird things happen to your hands. Got it?”
“Alright.”
There wasn’t much time to dawdle, but I took a quick glance at everyone. The monitors on everyone’s pod showed green for everything—vital signs, connection strength, power supply. With their eyes closed and their bodies still, they all looked asleep in their angled sleds. As soon as the initialization sequence started, the sleds would go into the horizontal position and retract inside the pod. It was time to hop into my own sled.
I executed the init command with a timer parameter. A whole sixty seconds to strap myself in. I’d also set alert sounds for a count down. A long tone at the ten-second mark, and another at zero seconds. I jogged over to my sled and strapped myself in, leaving the left cuff open like Elgin had told me to. I was a little concerned with what those strange effects were. I was also worried about what I was going to do about Nyla. The same questions and doubts and worries were walking through my mind like unwelcome but familiar ghosts.
Beeeeep.
The workstation beeped rudely. It was the ten-second warning.
I closed my eyes even though it was already pitch black with the visor on.
Beep.
Five seconds left.
Where did they take you?
Beep.
Three seconds left.
Gotta level up…
Beeeeeep.
TWELVE
The Grind
I opened my eyes, and the world rushed into view.
I was lying down in a big empty parking lot. Above me, the skies were overcast. Just a very plain expanse of light gray. Around me was a chain-link fence and a couple of cars. From the looks of the houses and the neighborhood, I was in a parking lot somewhere in Queens. According to the training exercise that I loaded from
BPMS, we were supposed to be in Corona, the epicenter of the pandemic.
Elgin and her team were lying on the ground in the same positions as we were in back in the real world.
We all rose to our feet and gathered around Elgin.
“Shake it out, team,” she said.
Everyone started checking themselves by flexing all their muscles and stretching out. Elgin saw that I was looking pretty lost, so she explained.
“It’s just like doing exercise. Gotta warm up. Sometimes folks come in here and they don’t know how to walk. Happens when the signal gets out of sync.”
I stretched myself out too. As I dangled my feet, I saw the lines on the ground of the parking lot and remembered a jumping drill. I leaped from one line to the other in single bounding strides, trying to make sure the ball of my foot hit the line each time.
Doing my leaps, I traveled from one end of the parking lot and back.
Halstead looked impressed.
“Where’d you learn to do that?” he asked.
“I’ve been practicing parkour since high school,” I replied. “Honestly, it’s been a while…”
Tong laughed. “I bet you kicked ass in hopscotch,” he quipped.
I broke out in a broad grin and chuckled.
“Actually,” I said, “ I didn’t used to be athletic when I was a kid.” It reminded me how much I changed from when I was a little kid up to college. That’s when I stopped growing. Why?
Elgin told me to start the training program, so I opened the console with my new gesture.
I had changed the gesture. It was actually Elgin’s idea. She told me that in a tactical situation, I didn’t want to have to reach over to my forearm. The best thing to do was to use a one-handed gesture that I could do any time, even if the rest of my body was pinned down. In her words, “You should be able to operate the console even if all you had left was a hand and a pair of eyeballs dangling by the nerves.” It was a gruesome image, and it scared me—I prayed that it would never come to that—but I was impressed at her attention to the minutiae of the battlefield.
The new gesture could be activated with either hand. To open the console, I had to squeeze my hand into a fist for at least a second, then explode my hands into a five-finger position while rotating my wrist inward, towards my body. I modded the console so that a one-handed keyboard would pop open under my palm, and the console window would appear about an arm’s length in front of my face.
With the console open, I checked the BPMS description on the exercise we’d just entered.
TASK: Enter and Clear an Apartment Complex (Fireteam) (11-20D115)
CONDITION: While operating as a part of a larger force, the squad is separated from the main force and must continue to extract noncombatants.
LOCATION: Urban terrain
Then, Elgin addressed us.
“Right now, we are continuing with the training plan. We still need to figure out how to handle the swarms of burners that BPMs is predicting. We’re looking at at least a million burners at the apex.”
The team looked at each other nervously. I was worried too. We were having trouble with a few hundred of them.
Elgin continued.
“As you know, when we experience intense pain in the STE, it disrupts the signal and we may experience brain damage. If that happens enough times, we’re at risk of becoming brain dead. Now, Wayne has found a way to make it so that we feel practically no pain. But to get there, we have to kill as many burners as we can.”
The team shifted uncomfortably as they digested what she was saying.
Elgin continued.
“We’re going to continue our training exercises. As much as we are learning from the training program, the training program is learning from us. They need that data to advance the simulations. Second, we’re going to kill as many burners as we can. It’s going to give us experience points, and Wayne will allocate them into our endurance stat as we level up.”
The team acknowledged her with a hooah, and Elgin continued with the plan.
The first thing we needed to do was hump it out to this one street where there was an eight-story apartment building. There were over three hundred apartments in there, which meant that there could potentially be over a thousand burners. We needed to get in there and clear it out. The hard part was that there were civilians in there (or as Elgin said, “noncombatants”). We couldn’t just toss grenades left and right and bomb the hell out of the burners. We had to be precise.
Elgin had everyone do an equipment check. Each scenario had its own load-out, and in this one every soldier had the standard layout for their position. Or, as we say in games, their class.
Elgin, Halstead, and Warner only had eight magazines for their carbines—240 rounds of ammo, plus another 30 already loaded up. Halstead also had a breaching shotgun. Addie was the grenadier, and he had a carbine too, plus four grenades for his launcher. Tong was the automatic rifleman, so he had 1200 rounds. Then everyone also had their sidearms—two magazines and one loaded, totaling 255 rounds. Altogether we had 2,265 bullets. Sounds like a lot on paper, but looking at the thousand-plus burners we were expecting…it didn’t actually seem like much.
All of us got into a file formation and started walking to the apartment complex. Warner took point, and I followed behind Elgin. It was quiet and my mind was wandering, so I asked her a question.
“Say, when I first got into the system, I remember a couple of weird things happening. We were in Midtown Manhattan, but there some buildings that didn’t look they belonged on the streets that they were on.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I saw a sign that said Nostrand Avenue, but that’s all the way in Brooklyn, not Midtown.”
Warner heard me, so he piped up.
“Let me ask you. You used to be a coder, right? You made games?”
“I tried making Tetris,” I said, chuckling, “but I mostly play games.”
“But you know how they’re made, right? Imagine trying to model the entire world, down to the last granule in the asphalt in the streets. Imagine making photorealistic 3D models for every single person. Every body has to be unique. And not just people. Where do you live?”
“Jackson Heights, I replied.”
“So let’s say that STESIS developers went to Jackson Heights, and they did a 3D scan of the streets and the houses and everything. And we plop you right in front of your house. You decide to go inside. How do you think the system knows what the inside of your house looks like?”
It was a good question. I didn’t have the answer, so I shrugged.
“The answer is that it doesn’t. The system actually uses you to create the environment.”
“How does it do that?” I asked.
“It uses your memories and your expectations. The first few times going into a private space that you know very well is going to feel weird. The system is making it up as you go along. But eventually, it learns your expectations and home starts to feel like home.”
Addie patted me on the shoulder. “So when you take a shit in the toilet, that toilet really feels like the one your ass has been sitting on all that time.”
Tong laughed. “What is it with you and bodily functions, man.”
“So is that why I couldn’t taste the milk I drank?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Warner replied. “STESIS is a learning machine. It’s lean. We never had a scenario where anyone was drinking milk, so all it knew was that milk is a cold white liquid. We don’t simulate much of taste or smell because it’s not a big part of training exercises. But the mechanism is there. Just takes time to feed it the data it needs.”
“But what happens if, say, I drink milk and I think it tastes creamy. But someone else grew up drinking low-fat milk and they think it tastes like water?”
Warner thought about it sullenly while we continued walking to our destination.
“Beats me, man,” he finally said, annoyed. “I think STESIS probably averages it o
ut or something like that. I don’t know, I didn’t make the damn thing. What the hell kind of question is that, anyway…”
It didn’t take long for us to get to the apartment complex. It was located right in the middle of a street on the long side of the block. The building was made of red-orange brick, and it was wider than it was tall. There wasn’t anything notable about it at all. Maybe just the fact we were anticipating a thousand burners in there.
Elgin led the team to the front entrance and started planning. The first thing she did was send out the Fly. It was that autonomous little drone I saw before. It could navigate buildings on its own. Its job was to scan the building and create a 3D blueprint. It was way better than relying on blueprints that were filed with the city. You could rotate and zoom in on the model and get a really good feel for the space that you’d be navigating. The other thing that the Fly could do was detect the presence of enemies. It used thermal imaging for that.
The only problem was that for a building that size, the Fly would take a long time because of how dense the environment was. All those walls and rooms reduced the range of its sensors. It’d take even longer if it was trying to scan for how many people were in the building.
Elgin sent in the Fly for a standard layout scan. As we waited for it, she told us what we’re doing.
“Team, our objective is to clear out that building and rescue anyone who hasn’t turned into a burner yet.”
“What if they’re infected but not hostile?” asked Addie.
“We evacuate them anyway. It’s not our job to determine whether or not to save anyone.”
“Who’s gonna get them out?”
Elgin pointed her chin at me.
“He can do it,” she replied. Then, speaking to me, she said, “You’re good at running. Follow us as we clear the building, stay close to Halstead. Don’t come into the rooms with us. You stay out in the hallway. When we bring a survivor out, Halstead will keep them safe. He’ll tell you when to bring them back out here.”
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