Sondra leans forward, her eyes wide and earnest. “We use the term scenario in the Trust because the VR environments we create are so much more than simple games—they’re complete virtual worlds.” She stares at Georgie for a little too long, and Hank shuffles his feet. He looks at Sondra and realizes who she reminds him of; in tenth grade, his English teacher, Mrs. Morgan, was some kind of preacher in her spare time, and she had the same burning light in her eyes as Sondra: the unbridled zeal of the true fanatic.
“So why not just call it VR?” Hank asks. “Calling it a scenario…I don’t know, it sounds a bit weird, doesn’t it?”
Sondra gives Hank a patronizing grin. “You’ll soon learn that in the Trust, we tend to use our own set of terminology. It may seem a little unusual at first, but don’t worry—you’ll get used to it very quickly. Everyone does.”
“OK.” Hank makes his mouth a straight line and bites back the rest of what he wants to say. If all the Trust’s students end up like Sondra, he doesn’t want anything more to do with it. What’s with these people? he wonders. I thought this program was supposed to be like a college, not some kind of crazy cult.
Georgie punches him on the arm. “Snap out of it, Hank. You said you’d play, remember?”
“All right. I’m just thinking up a few questions. You know, that’s what I came here to do.”
“OK, but we’ve done enough talking. Let’s play.” Georgie looks at Sondra. “Does it matter which chair we take?”
Sondra extends her arm toward the chairs. “Not at all. Just pick one of the chairs I’ve activated and make yourselves comfortable. As soon as the game launches, you’ll see a briefing in your UI, that’s your user interface. The only mission on offer today is based on a simple recon patrol. Remember, the jungle combat scenario is almost limitless, but for today, we’re providing a fairly constrained sector for you to explore—just to give you a feel for the environment.”
“We will get weapons, though, won’t we?” Georgie asks, and there’s a hint of disappointment in her voice.
“Sure, you’ll have a basic set of gear,” Sondra says. “But in the Trust, we believe in experiential learning, so the best way to find out more is to dive in and see what you can make of it.”
Georgie is already heading for a chair. “Sounds good to me. Come on, Hank.”
While Georgie relaxes into her seat, Hank walks slowly to the neighboring chair and sits down. But before he sits back against the expensive-looking upholstery, he catches Sondra’s eye. “I haven’t played in a while. What’s the sync like?”
A puzzled frown flits across Sondra’s face. “Sync? Oh, we call it integration. And don’t worry, it’s nothing like the old neural sync you get in domestic game gear. It’s a much more…” she hesitates as if searching for the right word. “It’s a much more complete experience. It’s very fast, and although some people report a little sensory distortion, it’s generally very smooth.” She smiles. “You’ll hardly notice a thing.”
Hank nods slowly, then he glances at Georgie. She looks fine: relaxed and lying very still, her arms on the cushioned armrests, her fingers lying flat on the soft fabric. She’s there already, he thinks, then he lies back in the chair, and despite the tingling sensation stirring in his stomach, his old habits kick in. Here we go, he thinks, and he lets his muscles relax. A ripple of unexpected warmth sweeps across his skin from head to toe, and though his eyelids grow heavy as the sync begins, Hank keeps his eyes wide open.
CHAPTER 12
STEWART PUTS A SMILE ON HIS FACE before he opens the door of Eileen’s cybersecurity lab, and he walks into the room slowly, like a man with all the time in the world.
Eileen is standing at the back of the lab next to a full-length locker. The locker door is open and she’s using the mirror on the inside of the door as she pulls her long auburn hair into a ponytail. She looks around as Stewart walks in. “Hi, Stewart, what can I do for you?”
“Nothing important,” Stewart says. “I’m just chasing up some routine matters. You know—hardening security, looking for possible loopholes. That sort of thing.”
Eileen checks her hair in the mirror then turns her attention to Stewart, her gray eyes locking onto his. “And you thought I could help? I’m sure you know the systems just as well as I do.” She frowns, thinking. “So what’s this really about, Stewart? You’ve never asked for my help before.”
Stewart laughs. “Working in cybersecurity has made you very suspicious, Eileen. But I have no ulterior motive, I can assure you of that.”
Eileen looks down for a moment. “OK. If you don’t want to tell me, you don’t want to tell me. That’s fine.” She turns away and takes something from her locker then closes the door. She faces Stewart with an enigmatic smile. “But if you’re not going to share, I hope you don’t mind if I carry on with my work while we talk.”
“No. That’s fine. I wouldn’t like to take up too much of your time.”
“Good. In that case, have you got your headset with you?”
Stewart pats his jacket pocket. “Always.”
“Great. Bring it with you, but you’ll need to transfer all the settings to this one.” She holds out her hand and uncurls her fingers.
Stewart looks at the sleek, black headset resting on her palm. “Is that a new model?”
Eileen nods. “We’re developing this with one of our partners. I was just about to run some tests, but if you join me, we can talk at the same time.”
Stewart takes the headset. The frame is thicker than usual, and it’s made from powder-coated metal rather than the carbon composite of regular gear. “Military?”
“I think you already know the answer to that, Stewart.”
Stewart hesitates. “All right. I’ll come along. But I do need to talk to you, so we’re not going to do anything too intense are we?”
“What’s the matter—afraid it might be a little too tough for you?”
Stewart smiles. “No. But it has been a little while since I stepped onto the type of battlefield you inhabit.”
“You’ll be fine. It’s just a basic setup, for testing purposes only.” She stands with her hands on her hips and looks at him expectantly. “Come on, get your headset synced and I’ll set you up in a chair. I’ll take you through the basics as we go.”
“Sure. No problem at all.”
Eileen heads across the room and Stewart follows, taking out his own headset as he goes and slipping it on. The usual menus appear in front of his eyes, and he focuses his attention on the settings, mentally calling up the command to transfer his personal profile to a new device. The system identifies the new headset immediately, but before he initiates the transfer of his settings, he runs a security program to probe the new headset for traces of malware. The program should complete in seconds, but almost instantly, an error message flashes up and the program terminates. Stewart frowns and looks carefully at the metal headset in his hand. It’s blocking me out, he thinks. Its interface must be encrypted.
“Are you having a little trouble there, Stewart?” Eileen calls back.
“No. It’s just taking me a moment to get the sync working.”
Eileen stops beside a steel-reinforced door and turns to face him. “You won’t find anything out by scanning it. The software in that headset is…well, let’s just say that our esteemed partners haven’t seen fit to share it—not even with me. You’ll be able to copy your profile onto that headset, but that’s the only transfer allowed. You can try and get around the security protocols if you really want to waste your time, but you won’t succeed.”
“Like I said, you’re getting very suspicious, Eileen. This gear is new to me, that’s all.”
“All right. I guess that’s your story and you’re sticking to it, huh? So let’s move on.” She takes a headset from her pocket and puts it on. “Are you ready?”
Stewart hurriedly synchronizes his personal profile across both headsets, then he slips off his own set and replaces it with the new one. “
Ready when you are.”
“OK. Let’s go.” Eileen pulls open the door and steps through, holding it open for Stewart to follow.
Stewart steps into the dimly lit war room and lets out a slow breath. He hasn’t stood inside a modern war room for several years, and the atmosphere in the place brings a host of memories rushing back to him. This room is immaculately clean and air conditioned, but the dim blue glow from the panels on each chair, and the deep shadows lurking in the corners of the room, immediately call to mind the stench of stagnant air and stale sweat that filled every day of his time in cyberwarfare. And he can almost feel beneath his fingertips the familiar, cracked vinyl upholstery of the chairs, and the layers of grime that always coated every armrest, every touch screen.
“It’s been a while, huh?” Eileen asks
Stewart hesitates. She’s studying his expression minutely, watching every twitch of his lips, every movement of his eyelids. “Tell me, Eileen, did you ever do some time in intelligence work?”
Eileen shakes her head. “Nope. I prefer to stand on a battlefield and see what I’m shooting at.”
“Pity. You’d have been a natural.”
Eileen half shrugs. “No way. Say what you like about bots, but they don’t play games with your mind.” She steps up to a VR chair. “You take this one. I’ll take the next one so I can talk you through it.”
“Thanks.” Stewart sits down, and as he settles into position, he has to smile. This chair is actually comfortable, and the armrests are so clean they look brand new. “When did you get this kit, Eileen? I don’t remember hearing anything about it.”
“We’ve had it a few months now. But we look after it.” She raises her eyebrows. “We have to—it costs a goddamned fortune.”
“US Government?”
Eileen lets out an exaggerated sigh. “Stewart, you know better than to ask.”
“All right. I was just interested.”
“You know what’s interesting?” Eileen asks. “You were going to let me take through the drill, but from the way you took to that chair, I reckon you really don’t need me to tell you anything about it. Why is that, Stewart? Why would you want me to tell you what you already know?”
Stewart does his best to look nonplussed. “I just assumed everything must’ve changed. You know how fast the tech moves these days. Surely there must be some new tricks I need to know.”
“OK.” Eileen takes a breath. “I guess you’re right. Tinsel Town has had a good number of upgrades in the last year or so. You’ll go in with a phase rifle—much smaller and lighter than the old pulse cannons. But you know what I always say.”
“Learn by doing?” Stewart suggests.
“That too. But I prefer, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.”
Stewart lets out a dry chuckle. “And may the devil take the hindmost, I suppose.”
“You got it.” Eileen sits back in her chair, and Stewart follows suit.
“Ready when you are,” Stewart says, and though his heart is racing, he grins. This might even be fun, he thinks and a simple message flashes up in front of his eyes:
INTEGRATION INITIATED - AUTOMATIC DEPLOYMENT IN 5 SECONDS
But I mustn’t lose sight of why I’m here, Stewart tells himself. I’ve got to get as much information as—
And then his thoughts are cut short as the war room winks out of existence. His chair falls away beneath him, and a wave of nausea roils in his stomach. The countdown changes to four, and his skin prickles; a million icy needles jabbing at his fingertips then scraping across the palms of his hands before racing up his arms to probe at his neck, his throat, his chest. Hell’s teeth! His muscles tighten, his back arches against the seat, and every instinct tells him to leap out the chair, to run while he has the chance. But he mustn’t fight the process, mustn’t make it harder for the system to sync with his neural pathways. The countdown reaches three, and Stewart breathes in through his nose and forces his mind to relax, to ignore the discomfort. I’d forgotten about all this, he thinks. He must be getting soft; all those years using domestic VR chairs have left him unprepared for the rigors of military grade hardware. He watches the countdown and pushes his other thoughts away. The numbers take an age to change, and a shudder runs through him. Something’s wrong! But no. The countdown vanishes, replaced by a single word:
DEPLOY
Engage, Stewart thinks. And it’s over. He’s standing on the virtual battlefield, a phase rifle in his hands. He looks rapidly left and right. The place is much as he remembers it, but now the web of yellow lines that forms the battlefield’s terrain is brighter and somehow sharper as if rendered at a greater resolution. The battlefield’s intricate lattice of light stretches smoothly away into the distance on all sides, and dotted across this surreal, undulating landscape, each connection between the yellow lines—each node—is picked out in bright blue.
“What do you think, Stewart?”
Stewart spins around to face Eileen. That’s strange, he thinks. Why did she deploy back there?
Eileen gives him an appraising look. “Are you all right? You look a little—”
“I’m fine,” Stewart interrupts. He squares his shoulders. “So, when does the fun begin?”
“Any moment now,” Eileen says. “You’ll see the bots, but on this iteration of the battlefield, they won’t all look the same.”
“No more big green blobs?”
Eileen smiles. “They’re green all right, but our system is smart. Rather than render all the bots the same and have the troops blast everything in sight, our algorithms analyze each bot’s behavior and assign it a risk factor. The bigger the threat, the bigger the target will appear.”
“I guess that makes them easier to hit.”
“No. The weapons will take care of that. It’s just more efficient. In the old days, the troops had to terminate every bot, even though our firewalls could’ve dealt with most of them. It was a wasted effort.”
“Yes,” Stewart says. “It was a war of attrition.”
“Exactly. Our enemies are sending in more and more bots in each attack. A lot of them are low-level threats, but they act like a smokescreen. They’re trying to flood our defenses.”
“And we can’t afford to let a single one through.” Stewart pauses. “I heard there’s a lot of recruitment going on. The States, France, Germany, here in the UK—they’re all building new centers for cyberwarfare.”
“Tell me about it,” Eileen says. “They keep trying to poach my best students. Just the other day—” She breaks off and raises her rifle. “Get ready, Stewart. Here they come.”
Stewart turns around and shoulders his weapon. And he gasps in astonishment. “What the hell are those?”
Eileen stands at his side. “Oh yeah. Some of them can fly.”
Stewart scans the battlefield. As well as the familiar green spheres rolling across the grid toward him, a huge number of torpedo-shaped bots are hovering above, darting erratically through the inky blackness. They glow bright red, and as he watches, the airborne bots break apart, scattering a payload of green spheres onto the battlefield. “Do we focus on the red ones?”
“That’s up to your judgment, Stewart. That’s why we’re standing here and not sitting at a desk, letting a chunk of software do our dirty work.”
“All right. I’ll target the airborne threats, and you mop up the high priority targets on the ground. OK?”
“I don’t recall putting you in charge, but it sounds like a plan.” Eileen sights along her rifle. “They’re in range. Let’s rock.”
Stewart targets an airborne bot and fires his rifle. The bot crackles and then disappears as if whisked out of existence. Don’t check the kill, Stewart reminds himself. Fire and move on. He selects another target and fires, then adjust his stance and chooses another. He lets his training kick in, becomes a part of a fighting machine. From the corner of his eye, he sees green spheres fizzing into nothingness as Eileen shows off her skills. She’s young, Stewart thinks. Her
reactions are so much faster than mine. But he doesn’t allow himself to be distracted; so long as Eileen is playing her part, he must play his.
Stewart loses all sense of time, immersing himself in the repetition, and it startles him when Eileen finally calls out to him: “We’re doing good. So what did you want to talk to me about?”
“Are we stopping now?”
Eileen laughs. “No. But I can shoot and talk if you can.”
Stewart lets a couple of shots fly and takes out two bots in rapid succession. “All right. I was looking into the security logs and I came across something interesting with some time stamps.”
“Tampering?”
Stewart takes a breath and looks across at Eileen. “Could be. It’s hard to say at this stage.”
Eileen meets his gaze. “And you suspect…who?”
“No one. Not yet.” Stewart turns to face Eileen, but without warning, she raises her rifle and fires a shot over his shoulder.
Stewart spins around to see an airborne bot looming over him. It’s the first time he’s let a bot get so close, and he stares, wide-eyed. It’s huge!
Eileen fires again and the bot implodes and vanishes. “I should’ve warned you. The delivery bots can get pretty nasty. Some of them take two or three shots. Maybe more.”
Stewart looks at her. But you didn’t warn me, did you? he thinks. Why is that? A sneaking sensation of unease is stirring in the back of his mind, but he keeps his expression neutral. “Thanks. I shouldn’t have let it get so close.”
“The big ones generally try to outflank any defenses. Next time you see one, give it a few rounds to make sure.”
“Will do.” Stewart turns his attention back to the battlefield. But as he moves, he senses Eileen stepping back, and he can no longer see her in his peripheral vision.
“You figured I might know something about these timestamps?” Eileen asks, and there’s a note of tension in her voice that grabs Stewart ’s attention.
“Not directly, no. But it occurs to me that a student may have the necessary—”
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