Liberation Game

by Kris Schnee

  "Probably, but it made you look bad. Are you done with those three yet? I'll buy you a beer."

  "Once I'm off duty. We're delayed a few hours to triple-check the equipment since there's that construction going on next door. The senator's fussing like he's got a meeting to get to."

  In Golden Goose's first days, Robin and Edward had started out with "clean living" and demanding the same on the project's land. That lasted weeks before they caught people with stills, bowed to the inevitable, then found that honestly brewed beer could be pretty good. Besides, the bar was a thriving little business. It was called the Lucky Shot these days. Robin met Mike there under a tin-roof awning and slid a bottle over to him. Mike wore something odd tonight on his shoulder: a patch with a stylized wings design. "What's that?" asked Robin.

  "You know the Horizon case?"

  "Yeah. American kid tried to get somebody uploaded illegally, right?"

  Mike took a drink. "He and his friend are knights in there now, pushing people to make themselves useful."

  "I'm guessing they do more than play at having swords and armor?"

  "There are characters whose official stats say 'Class: Knight', but there's at least one specific knightly order that does quests in and out of the game to help Ludo's players. Dealing with jerks, trying to get people out of abusive relationships, giving counseling to new and prospective uploaders. It's kind of silly to slap a fantasy label on that, but they probably do more good than most actual knights ever did." Mike fiddled with the bottle and glanced down at his shoulder patch. "Some of us wear the wings to remind us we need more people like them."

  Robin said, "Like what? Pro-uploading, criminal, or useful in Talespace?"

  "I mean, not just playing the game they're presented with. Doing more. Like us leaving home behind to live out here." He looked up to meet Robin's eyes. "We're on the same team. Profit for Ludo means profit for your people -- and she already talked to me about your request for robot security. Haven't you already got Lumina?"

  "She's not my security guard. She's here to learn from us, going back and forth between worlds. That's better than playing at being a hero within Talespace like the 'knights'."

  Mike nodded, and drank. "In there, I hear, they tell stories about Golden Goose."

  "Must seem like hell compared to their world."

  "The thing is, we're the ones making it less so."

  * * *

  Days later, when the three latest customers had gone to their digital paradise, Lumina presented him with a bill of materials and a blueprint. Robin said, "A security drone? This doesn't look like Ludo's style." It wasn't anthropomorphic at all, just a cheap treaded cube with sensors and nonlethal weaponry.

  "It's being patented through a different company. I worked with some engineers who were running in accelerated time." The AI on Robin's screen scuffed one hoof against some grass. "I'm not sure they needed me."

  "Time?"

  "We can run a mind faster than normal, in an isolated environment. Costs extra for Ludo but it's good for high-priority projects. I usually run slower than real-time when I'm not visiting Earth."

  Robin set his computer down and whistled. "So you do have a limited resource. Who's running the fastest? The slowest?"

  "The fast ones are mostly her best engineers, since they're helping her goals. Slow? I think she has a few people paused because they're upset about something."

  "Can a guy like Moneybags a few days ago buy his way into the fast lane?"

  Lumina's ears flicked. "You mean, permanent high speed? Not as far as I know. It wouldn't make sense anyway if he's going to interact with others."

  "That's a relief." Even the most unequal human societies had never given the rich the power to evade time itself, cramming a month of whoring and feasting into a day. "I suggest not advertising the time difference, though."

  "I'll pass that along," said Lumina. "I don't think most newcomers even understand. What do you think of the security bot?"

  Robin looked it over again. "Looks useful."

  "I helped! I passed along your inventory data and prices and made sure your equipment can build parts of it."

  He smiled at the native's pride. "More of you should come here and learn what you're learning."

  She gave him a teasing smile. "Outreach works both ways. You should play more of Thousand Tales."

  * * *

  The "Fun Zone" building went up quickly. Robin toured it and told Edward, "I'm impressed. It would fit right in, in the States. Are you really going to get a regular crowd way out here, though?"

  "At first? No." Edward took off one of his work gloves and wiped his forehead. Robin had been giving him a hand with some furniture. "The 'magic' starts to matter when it becomes ordinary. At first it'll be that place the rich foreigners go to, but in time it'll be the place everybody takes their kids."

  "Water and power are going to be a problem."

  "We have the power grid connection and backups." Edward looked around, then spoke quietly. "If we play our cards right and this place expands, she might bring in a fusion reactor with energy to spare."

  Robin whistled. "Too big an investment though. It'd get seized." Governor Leopold knew well enough to look to the long term, and he'd even fought to defend Golden Goose, but his bosses were less reliable.

  Fusion energy was finally becoming available in the late 2030s after generations of research. Technically, fusion reactors had existed since the early days of television, which used a similar particle gun widget, but those were completely useless because they produced less usable power than they consumed. Now the basic problem was solved, and the only questions left were cost, size and safety. They were innately safer than the old uranium-fission plants too. It'd be an amazing, awesome piece of tech if Robin actually had one rather than just getting to ogle news articles about it. And unfortunately, every greedy government official would want an excuse to take it for themselves.

  Edward said, "Ludo thinks of it as raising the stakes. She'd need more defense, more independence here -- and more willingness to look like an armed machine overlord, which is riskiest of all."

  "For her."

  * * *

  Robin went to the school. The village had outgrown its one-room schoolhouse. Instead of building a larger structure next to the clinic as planned, they'd picked out a low hilltop, poured a new concrete slab, and had the kids help lay the dirt bricks of the walls. The new structure was bigger than it had to be, and strangely laid out. It didn't have classrooms where Misses Grindle, Grendel and Grumble would run students through the assembly line of History and Math and Science, Grades One through Twelve. Instead, there was a giant square tent ringed by small rooms for music, quiet discussion or storage. The corners had reinforced walls and a second-story balcony each, giving the school the look of a castle.

  This was not entirely for whimsical reasons.

  When Robin arrived, most of the students were in the main room under the weatherproof canvas that let a hint of the sunlight through. On a big screen, a flotilla of boats was approaching an island with a gently-sloping beach.

  A boy stood in front of the class, holding a Talisman game pad and fiddling with the buttons instead of looking at anybody. "So, um, this is Sicily. 1943. And this is a transport craft." The camera view swung around to show a boat with a hinged jaw that fell open so that a tank could roll out -- but the tank crashed into the water and sank, making a sad trombone sound. "It was like this. They, um, the Allies couldn't get up there on the sand because it was shallow and the ships would get stuck at just the wrong depth. So what they did was like this."

  The kid switched the game's view over to a boat with a bunch of metal blocks on its left like a motorcycle's sidecar. As it roared toward the island, there were men hanging for dear life onto the blocks, crashing through the waves. The contraption of steel rammed the shallow coast like a spear. The men whipped out axes and slashed through some cables, making the metal parts telescope out into a broad strip exte
nding hundreds of feet from the sand to the shallows. Another transport ship zoomed into view and dropped a tank onto the new raft to let it splash ashore. "Bam, instant dock! So, um, that's how it worked. I'm done."

  The schoolmistress, the lone adult running the place today, clapped. The others followed suit. "Not bad, Carlos, but remember eye contact." She nodded toward Robin and said, "Sir."

  The boy reluctantly lifted his gaze from the screen to look at the other kids. "Any questions?"

  Robin was leaning back against the doorway. Another boy said, "Did they really have axes?"

  "Yeah! They said it was to chop through the cables. You can cut steel like that if it's tight. But you have to be really brave to ride the thing in the first place because it was, um..." He looked back at the screen. "Can you show it again but turn on the gunfire and explosions?"

  The animation replayed, but as the pier-building craft headed for the beach, machine guns rattled and kicked up bursts of water all over the coast. Robin wasn't the only one who winced instinctively. Artillery pounded the sand and made something explode on one side of the screen, but the men on the crazy raft kept riding until they rammed the beach.

  "Oh come on, they didn't really do that!" a girl said.

  "Totally! They were called Seabees. They knew how to build stuff while getting shot at and exploded."

  The teacher smiled. "More questions? No? Then Carlos gets his badge in Modern Military Engineering." The big screen showed a glittering badge with crossed shovels.

  Robin said, "Actually, I've got a question. What else did you learn to get that?"

  The boy avoided his eyes. "I read about building airports out of coral, and sandbag walls -- I built one! -- and I did a written report about how airfields work. Here." He fiddled with the Talisman and the big screen flicked over to a grassland of stone spikes. This incarnation of the educational prototype Robin had seen, was much more filled out. A military fort was perched atop one spire, connected to a Roman camp and an airport.

  "Looks like good work." Robin turned to the teacher. "Sorry to interrupt. You invited me to drop by sometime, though, and do a little lecture myself."

  The teacher hesitated. "This might not be the best time, sir, but you may as well see this too." She clapped. "We have a duel. Stand up, Maria and Dawn."

  Robin hadn't been informed about any duels. He hung back as one kid, a hulk of a girl, stood with clenched fists. "Yeah, we do. Dawn here called me a 'lezzy butch dwarf'."

  The other girl was slender and smug. "Oh, did I hurt your little feelings? I didn't say anything and you can't prove it."

  "It was behind my back, you little bitch."

  The teacher barked, "Maria."

  Robin had been a bit of a bully around age eight, being relatively big and tough for his age, but he'd gotten past that and tried to live it down. He felt like he should be interfering, but had no idea how.

  The teacher said, "Dawn, are you denying you called her anything?"

  "I can say what I want."

  Maria glowered. "Uh-huh! And I can say, everybody ought to kick her our of our games for a week. I challenge her to a spell fight, standard Eden System rules. Take damage and you're banned for a week. From the message boards, too."

  Dawn said, "This is stupid. You think you're the boss of me?"

  "Gonna forfeit then, or shut up and apologize?"

  "You shut up. You're on."

  The students cleared a space in front of the big screen, where the dueling girls could sit far apart. Each focused on their Talisman pads while everybody else looked at the shared view of an arena. Maria's character was a warrior with an axe, versus Dawn who was a frilly magical girl with a black cat and a wand. Maria, though, swapped out her weapon for a wand of her own. They began doing some kind of incantations in secret.

  On ten, Dawn fired off a bolt of lightning at the warrior. Maria's spell was just a wave of force that struck the incoming spell and negated it. Maria then tossed her wand aside. The game declared, "Draw!"

  "A null spell!" said one boy. Another added, "She went pure defense?"

  "Huh?" said Dawn.

  Maria sniffed. "I know she's tough in a fight. I just wanted a shot at her." She faced Dawn down and said, "Next time, though, I will hurt you even if I take damage and get banned too."

  "Hmmph. Showoff."

  "Well!" said the teacher. "I think that's resolved, for the moment. Sir Robin has been waiting patiently to give a brief talk about the business we do by selling coffee."

  After Robin spent twenty minutes doing a fun talk about the farming industry, he headed out and contacted Ludo from his office. "When did the kids start dueling?"

  "Last month. It was the idea of a young player in Italy, actually, and it's been spreading across all the schools I influence. I didn't even suggest the idea of a duelist holding back from attacking; that has re-evolved on its own."

  "So long as they're not using real weapons, I guess it's not too bad. But what if somebody accuses another falsely and uses their magical pie-slinging powers to bully other students?"

  Ludo said, "That's happened a few times. So far the data says that usually a cluster of other challenges breaks out, and after the teacher panics, I have someone talk them into a settlement of some kind. Sometimes involving a semester-long 'war' that conveniently makes the kids forget the original argument, and which ends."

  Robin whistled. "What a mess."

  "Were you ever a kid, Robin? From what I hear, this is an improvement over the usual mind games, humiliating nicknames, random beatings, cliques and other charming aspects of the early human experience. It hardly ever leads to actual violence, and I think it would've happened in those cases anyway. I'm able to mitigate it; I have a detailed social graph of who hates who. It even ties in with an educational theory called model/rival."

  "Well, great. We're going to get a generation that only knows how to solve problems by pretending to shoot spells at each other. Using your game. That isn't a skill that they can use in the future."

  "Isn't it? A big part of what you watched was verbal argument and assertiveness, always good to learn. And if my game becomes more prominent, some version of Eden System rules will be available to them as adults."

  "And the teaching itself? Is everybody going to use the game for their schooling?"

  Ludo said, "Ideally, from my perspective. Some of the work is inspired by a method called problem-based learning, which has the drawback of requiring more teacher effort than a lecture. It's gotten easier because a basic AI can do some of the support work, and we'll eventually have uploaders to help."

  He felt troubled by the thought of where this hocus-pocus would lead, even though he'd welcomed it. Maybe everybody would recite a Pledge of Allegiance to Ludo each morning. Robin dropped the subject and spent an idle hour helping some other adventurers fight a kobold army.

  * * *

  One Friday, Mike the clinic technician stopped by his office. "I'm putting together a Tales group for some combat support. You have a character in Midgard, right?"

  "Yeah, look." Robin logged in and showed off his character sheet.

  [Robin Farshot

  PRIVATE INFO

  Account type: Standard

  Mind: Tier-III

  Body: Human

  Main Skills: Archery, Ride, Survival, Acrobatics, Climbing

  Talents: Called Shot, Perfect Balance

  Save Point: Chapel Of the Dragon, Tulgey Wood

  PUBLIC INFO

  Note: Glow crystals for sale.

  Class: Ranger]

  He'd made himself a pretty standard adventurer in his limited free time. It was nice that he could be useful in a situation like this.

  Mike said, "No healing skills, then?"

  "I'm just an archer. I don't play all that often."

  "I can teach you, then. VR pods, tonight at seven."

  Robin hadn't tried the Fun Zone's virtual reality system yet. That evening he stopped by. He was pleasantly surprised to see the
place was crowded tonight. Golden Goose's people were actually able to afford to go out on a Friday night for pizza and gaming!

  Edward was at a table, playing with a businesslike tablet. "Hey there, Robin. Glad you could join us."

  "You're in on Mike's VR party?"

  "You couldn't force me into one of those pods; I get motion sickness. I'll be manning a catapult in the battle tonight though."

  "Cool. Are we fighting for anything in particular?"

  "The honor of Golden Goose. We're teaming up with the Ethiopia base against the Castor Clan."

  Robin had been in occasional contact with Ludo's operation in Ethiopia, which had a similar setup combining private charity, a gaming center, and an attempt to make money. He didn't envy them, since they were in an even poorer region, and under pressure from both the Muslims in the eastern part of the country and the Chinese who were trying to become the new overlords of Africa. The people sticking around there were the brave ones.

  "Count me in on the battle. I'd like to see how they do."

  He went to the back room, where there were four alcoves sporting fancy VR pods and several more were empty for future use. He joined Mike and two of his friends to show up in Talespace, Midgard region specifically, for a battle.

  Mike gave him some basic training in the healing arts by handing him a scroll and teaching him how to read some runes on it in a certain pattern that would ease an ally's wounds. Robin looked out at an enemy army of knights, wizards and low-tech gunslingers. He said, "Aren't we going to get serious lag having a group on two continents and a seastead?"

  "It's not too bad," Mike said. He'd appeared as a white-robed mage not too different from his appearance as a real medic. "This is really a self-contained shard within Midgard that only has a few dozen people directly affecting it at once. And we're the rearguard, so be ready to treat any front-line fighters who fall back."

  The battle was fun, but not terribly exciting for Robin. Except for a bit where a giant orc got up in his face and he barely fended the guy off with some arrows. After facing the real thing, Robin could laugh off a pretend battle like this. And not have his hands shake too much with the memory of being shot at.