by Isaac Stone
Kurt put down the rifle and turned to Bob the hellspawn. The little creature in his black uniform and jackboots was still there. Kurt was glad, as it could’ve made a run for the warehouse at any time. He could’ve shot it, but then the warehouse and all the NZ’s inside would know his position. He’d have to flee very fast if they knew where he was. Kurt didn’t like the odds on escaping the NZ wrath. Nor did he think it was even possible, they'd have to be faced eventually.
“So what’s your take on all this, Bob?” Kurt said to him, mostly to talk himself through it out loud, “We’ve got an entire brigade of these things in there and no way to stop them. I can’t even call in air support without finding a save point and buying the upgrades, shit on me for saving the credits right? So if you want to make a run for it, might as well. Best thing I can do is get the hell out and hole-up until the firefight is over. Go ahead I won’t shoot you unless you run in the direction of that horde.”
Nevertheless, Bob didn’t do a thing. He merely stood there and looked at Kurt. Man, thought Kurt, this AI is barely above basic Call of Duty bot level, seems like they'd have given it a few more interaction parameters.
“Alright, Bob,” Kurt, told him again. “I said make a run for it. Go.” He gestured to the right with his gun.
“I stay,” Bob announced as he stood there.
“Why?” Kurt demanded, and he was reminded of the tales of frustration he'd read about in the early days of gaming, when players of an old text based game Zork would attempt conversation with NPCs, “What possible reason could you have for staying? What’s the big deal here?”
“Next to entrance,” Bob told him. “Look. See.” It pointed toward the entrance of the building where more NZ troopers marched into the parade ground.
Kurt placed the scope to his eye and looked into it. He pointed it at the location Bob mentioned.
There was the first female hellspawn he’d seen so far inside the game. At least it appeared to be female from the outer characteristics. Next to it were three little nightmare creatures. Nazi Zombie tentacle monsters every one.
Kurt turned to Bob. “Friends of yours?”
“Family,” Bob nodded.
“This is insane,” Kurt told him and reached down to grab the radio at his belt.
The radio still worked, but Kurt turned down the volume. He depressed the send button the moment he had it up to mouth level.
“Hey, Command, not the merc Command but you game designer types” Kurt said into the microphone. “This is Silva, we have a problem. My man Bob the Nazi tells me that his family is held hostage by the NZ’s. I'm trying to interact but I'm not getting much out of him, maybe a problem with the AI or a glitch in the campaign mode. Please advise.”
The radio crackled a few times, then Kurt hit the receive button. A message was already on the way.
“Received your traffic, Silva,” the voice of Command called out to him, not the over-the-top merc commander, but the other voice, the one that put him on the mission against the snipers in the first place, and Kurt realized he'd gotten the design team's attention, “It looks like you've found a backdoor into the NPC spawn point, and Bob has gone off script. To maintain the scenario integrity for all the other players, and the viewers worldwide, Mr. Rashid says if you roll with it, keep the show going for our audience, you will be given a sum equal to five percent of the grand prize money. Win or lose. That is all.” The light on the radio went out.
“Well Bob,” Kurt said to the zombie nightmare crouched next to him. “Looks like it's on me to give the paying audience what it wants, and I get paid whether I make it or not,” He waited for a reaction.
“Get family?” Bob asked him. It was hard to tell a reaction from the creature, but Kurt thought he saw hope.
“There's no way I can take on that whole army and win, but it will disrupt them enough that the other teams will have a chance,” Kurt explained. “And it makes for great television!” Bob looked at him in confusion.
“Shit, good thing you aren’t real, your family is probably gonna end up as scrap metal,” Kurt continued, as he started counting the imaginary money in his head, and coming to the conclusion that like they said, win or lose, he was on track to get paid, which meant one step closer to Jesse and freedom.
“Sucks to be a bot,” said Kurt as he thumbed the safety off of his assault rifle.
Chapter 16
“My family?” Bob asked him. He stood up straight as they’d sat down to observe the warehouse.
Kurt ignored him.
At the present, the columns of the NZ brigade marched out of the warehouse in formation. Officers in their jodhpurs in front, NCO’s behind them, with the grunts hauling up from the rear. Some carried light automatic weapons, some old rifles. It didn’t matter, with the training they showed in formation, Kurt didn’t think it would take them very long to eliminate most of the players. It would be a war of attrition, and odds were against the players at this point, especially if they'd started shooting each other out of either boredom or ambition. These were definitely a step up from 'recruit' difficulty bots and firmly in the 'hurt me plenty' range.
“I think I can scatter the bastards all over the place,” Kurt told him. “Enough grenades in the launcher on my assault rifle to bounce them over the horizon. Reduce their numbers, maybe give our sorta kinda comrades a head's up. That sound good to you, Bob?”
Bob looked over the crate and began to jump up and down. “My family!” it yelled. After which point Bob began to yell in all manner of languages that Kurt didn’t understand.
Kurt decided to look around the crate too. What he saw made him understand why Bob was so excited.
Three armed NZ guards were in the process of pushing out Bob’s family. Two of them forced the woman creature to move to one side of the exterior of the building. Another one began to slap at the little NZ’s.
Kurt reached into a holster on one side of his belt and handed Bob a loaded six-shooter. Just to make sure he had enough, Kurt gave him a box of shells.
“You know how to use one of these, Bob?” Kurt asked him.
By way of an answer, Bob shot the sentry sneaking up on them. Kurt didn’t even know it was there. Ok then, Kurt thought, the roleplaying AI was glitchy as hell, but the ally mode was apparently in working order.
“Yes,” Bob told him as the cloud of smoke cleared in the air,” Watch out!” He spun to the other side with the pistol.
Bob pumped bullets into the two sentries that were behind the first. Kurt had his rifle up by then and saw more of them swarm down the side of the nearest building. They’d waited for this opportunity until someone didn’t think Kurt was watching. In his mind Kurt upgrades his idea of these bots to 'ultraviolence' difficulty.
Kurt laid down a line of fire at them and took out three of the NZ’s as they attempted to come up behind them. Had Bob not noticed the line, it might’ve worked.
Kurt popped off three more, with a shot for each. Two tried to run and he took them out with a few more rounds. It was over in 30 seconds, not the fastest shooting he’d done, but he was still alive and racking up points.
Bob took three steps in the direction of the warehouse and stopped. His family was gone. In the confusion of the firefight, they were hustled off. Kurt didn’t have the slightest idea where they took them.
“Like the man says,” Kurt told Bob, “We have a situation here. I don’t know where your family went and there is an armed column headed out to eliminate all the gamers who thought they were about to win the grand prize. If you have any insight into where the Supreme Command took your folks, now is the time to let me know.”
“Back,” Bob told him. “Back building. But wait.”
He stopped for a few minutes and pointed at the column that was marching away from them. “They have help,” he said.
“Then I suppose they do,” Kurt sighed as he kept the rifle across his chest, and started to put the pieces together. Rashid might want Kurt to cover for a programming gli
tch that allowed him to access the spawn point while millions of people were watching, and thank god nobody had audio, but if the ambush had worked the zombie legion could still wipe out the players no problem. Maybe the big boss himself was betting against the players.
“As a matter of fact,” Kurt continued. “I would expect plenty of people on the outside who’ve paid to watch this are betting on the players. They're the top hundred, of course they'd bet that way, driving the odds of a mission fail into epic fortune territory. Ha! I wonder what the bookies would do if they found out Rashid fixed his own game. Just a theory is all, and its certainly less depressing than Jesse's.”
“Drone coming,” Bob told him. Kurt had to admit that it was not possible to tell what might happen next in this place, there was no getting board in Killstreak.
Kurt held his rifle tight and looked around. He could not see anything, but one could still be on the way.
After a number of spectacular drone helicopter crashes, most of them were banned from civilian airspace, which resulted in an increased use of standard aircraft. The problem was that the fuel crisis that came soon afterward made it impossible to replace them and make any money. After the various governments looked at the numbers, they decided the thing to do was pump money into larger drones. Small drones were around for a long time, but the larger ones, capable of carrying people, were still in the experimental stage. The batteries were always the problem as they could only carry so much juice. After a long period of research, a suitable electrolyte was found which was light and could be recharged for years at a time. Thus the portable carry vehicle drone was born. They could fly down into any location with enough room to land, pick up a passenger and deliver him or her to any location in range of a battery charge. The first ones were very limited, but, within a few years, it was not unusual to see big drones buzzing around neighborhoods on their way to pick up an emergency victim to a hospital or to acquire passengers for an airport. Business executives used them for quick transportation and everyone knew somebody who’d rode in a drone.
There were a few spectacular accidents, such as a drone that was hacked as part of a blackmail scheme and cut out at four hundred feet, but most people agreed the benefits outweighed the fear.
Kurt had worked with them in the past. As a young man unable to find decent employment, he’d attended a state supported school for drone mechanics. It was a rigorous program since every part needed to be certified and every bit of work performed needed to be countersigned by a superior. He enjoyed it, but the long hours and boring work drained his ability to focus. He spent the evenings on video and online games. When he found he could make decent money in the online shooter circuit, Kurt switched to his first love. He still remembered how to change a battery and what to look for if the rotors didn’t synchronize correctly. It was something he could play through his mind if he was bored.
If they sent one against him, they'd have a surprise in store.
“I don’t see a thing,” Kurt told Bob as he scanned the horizon. If nothing else, a big drone generated a lot of sound from its rotors.
“There,” Bob said and pointed to the north.
Now he saw it.
It began a dot in the sky and the sound of the blades was heard as the drone came closer. It grew to a larger dot and the noise with it. Kurt covered his eyes with one hand to see well. It was a human-sized drone for certain, one of the larger ones built to transport several people and their gear. It was headed in their direction.
It moved over the warehouse where the NZ column departed minutes ago. This Kurt found very strange, as it took no evasive maneuvers. Whoever controlled it assumed that there were no hostiles on the ground. Why it was here remained a mystery. Kurt assumed all the hell creatures left with the force that departed.
“Why is it here?” Kurt asked Bob. “Do you have any idea?” Bob seemed to be puzzled too, but it was hard to tell because of the strange way he looked.
“Supreme Commander,” Bob responded. “Pick up.” Bob turned his head and watched the drone began to make its descent.
So this was the plan. Use the drone to ferry out the top dogs involved with the organization and let the scrubs walk the distance to the final staging area. Kurt still had trouble understanding why they went to this trouble if the NZ were all mechanical bots. Why not place them in storage until needed again? It was another thing he couldn’t figure out about this tournament.
He just might still have a chance to kill Hitler and rescue the family before this was over. Flawless victory!
Oh hell yes.
The dust began to kick up from the prop wash of the drone. The sound of the rotors almost deafened Kurt, but he expected they would shut it down the moment it landed. It wasn’t always necessary to keep them in motion once on the ground. Usually this was only done if the drone expected to lift off right away. Kurt began to formulate a plan.
“Bob,” Kurt told the creature. “You want to get your family back don’t you?” He waited for a response.
Bob nodded in response.
“I can take control of that drone and we will fly them out,” Kurt explained to Bob. “You ready to go for it?”
This time Bob nodded with great enthusiasm.
“Okay,” Kurt told Bob, “we have to move quickly. In a few seconds the door will open and we need to be on the inside.” Kurt watched the drone carefully.
The rotors slowed down, then quite spinning. The drone was supposed to be on the ground for a while, which was good. Whoever remotely controlled it planned on the drone being grounded for a while. Thus, they didn’t have to rush. At least not too much.
They walked cautiously, but with determination, up to the drone. It was only fifty yards away, but Kurt didn’t want to scare the operator into taking it airborne. He wanted to get inside that drone and make use of it.
As they approached the drone, Kurt and Bob almost fell over from the fright caused by a series of explosions and gunfire. They stopped, looked at each other, but continued to move. The sounds were too far away to make a difference. The players were on their own now.
The drone was quiet, but they still had to be careful how to approach it. The last thing Kurt wanted was a sniper noticing them as they made their way toward the drone. It was black and shiny; most of the exterior was coated with photoelectric receptors that helped charge batteries of the flying contraption. Kurt noticed it had no distinguishing marks on the outside, but did note it was the same model made by the largest drone manufacturing company, Zeebacha, a Chinese concern. They’d been building them in the United States for years.
Bob stayed a few paces behind Kurt, but managed to keep his gun out and ready. Kurt noted the creature didn’t have the least bit of trouble loading the pistol when it was empty. He’d used one plenty of times before.
They stopped right behind it. Kurt could see motion inside the drone’s forward windows. It didn’t have large windows, as it didn’t need them. The drone was controlled by a very elaborate computer network that found whatever landing space was built into the system. All the occupant or dispatcher had to do was enter the coordinates of the landing site and the drone could find it without trouble. Even in storms, snow or wind. The drone could compensate for the weather when it needed to do so and could fly around any severe storms. There were stories of drones that dodged tornados so they could get to their destination on time.
Two things happened very close together.
The first was the side door on the drone that faced Kurt and Bob opened. It snapped open quick and the occupant, a small man in his thirties almost fell out with a case in his hands. This was the moment Kurt needed. He jumped over to the man and grabbed the case out of his hands. Before the small man could rise up, Bob smashed him in the skull with the butt end of the pistol and joined Kurt inside the drone. This time the man went down and stayed down. Kurt slammed the door from the inside after Bob was there with him.
The second thing happened after they were in the helicopter
. Kurt turned to the window and looked at the front of the warehouse.
It was filled with a new version of Nazi Zombies. These were all seven-feet tall and wore brown uniforms over their misshapen bodies. None of them had faces. They reminded Kurt of a horror movie monster he saw on video as a kid. Things that lived in acid pools and pulled people in that lacked faces.
He didn’t count, but there had to be a hundred of them. Somehow, he’d missed their presence the first time he’d scoped out the warehouse. Good for them the creatures simply stood in place and stared at the drone. However, how could they stare without any faces?
Kurt had very little time to get the drone up in the air.
Good for him the basic drone design hadn’t changed that much since he worked on them. While Bob watched, Kurt reached down under the dashboard and found the auto control for it. It took him 30 seconds to pull it out and find the chip in the back that made the drone dependent on the place that dispatched it. It took him two minutes to enter the code to get the drone off the ground and into the air. Once it was in the sky, he would come up with a plan to make use of it.
As the new hell creatures began to move, Kurt entered a pass code he wasn’t supposed to have, black market leftovers from his school days usually used to cheat on exams. He said a silent prayer to the twelve gods of Greece that it would work. If ever he needed the help of Zeus, it was now.