Ghost Platoon

by Xavier P. Hunter

  Lin shook her head. “This isn’t just inexperience. Something’s wrong here.”

  Reggie cackled as June closed in on the Outlaw Valkyrie, piloting like she’d been born at the controls. “I’m Commando spec, and I took a laser blast getting into that hangar. I bet that defensive corridor was meant for a platoon on foot. Props to the Lucky Outlaw who went in there, but he—”

  “She,” Lin cut in. “That was Maj. Shannon Austin. Keep ‘em straight.”

  “She must have gotten pretty messed up getting through there,” Reggie finished.

  Chase spoke with his mouth full. “See? All part of the grand plan. Commando spec all the way, baby.”

  The final duel was a dissection. June harried the Outlaws’ pilot, putting shot after shot into the wobbling, veering Valkyrie and ducking swiftly into cover before its return fire.

  After taking exacting care and receiving one a glancing hit the whole time, June finally, mercifully, placed a final, precision hit square into the Valkyrie’s cockpit.

  GRAND CHAMPIONS: GHOST PLATOON

  The towers of the arena crumbled. The force fields all across and around the space station flickered out. The camera pulled away to watch the space station plummet into a fiery atmospheric re-entry.

  Reggie looked around. June hadn’t shown up in the green room with them. “Um…”

  But rather than June appearing in their midst, Reggie and the rest of Ghost Platoon vanished back into the game.

  June landed her Valkyrie in the middle of the hangar area. The others appeared in front of their own new rides. Even Reggie’s had been replaced behind its name plaque, fully repaired.

  Overhead, the towering rubble of the arena loomed, and the sky burned.

  A thrill of fear churned Reggie’s guts, unsure what was coming next. Experience hinted that being aboard anything about to crash was a one-way ticket to a login screen.

  Then the station hit the planet below. With a thunderous crash like an earthquake, the ground shook. The rubble shook to dust. Reggie and his fellow champions found themselves now within a vast stadium bowl, with seats rising around on all sides like a scaled-up version of the Colosseum in Rome. There had to have been half a million people there watching.

  A raised dais pushed up from the turf, and an elevator lifted Ken Bradley from somewhere underground. He spoke into a handheld microphone, voice booming across the planet’s surface. “Congratulations to Lin Chen, Chase Gaines, Frank McCoy, June Mallet, and Reggie King. I present to you, your First Annual Valhalla West Ragnarok Showdown … GRAND CHAMPIONS!”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Arriving at the after party was like waking up from one dream into another. The pressure to perform had vanished, and in its place, an unsettled drifting sensation. The venue was a stylized version of the Viking home for the honored dead: Valhalla. Waitstaff in horned helmets, furs, and armor bore wooden platters laden with ironbound wooden tankards sloshing with mead. Ghost Platoon was the only team present. The rest of the guests seemed to all be developers, media, Internet celebrities, and military personnel.

  Reggie determined that he was going to get some answers at last.

  June stayed nearby as Reggie navigated the crowd while the others in the platoon dispersed to explore, accept congratulations, and possibly negotiate sponsorship deals. As they wove politely through the throng, she suddenly squeezed his arm. “Ooh, I still can’t believe we won the whole thing. That Valkyrie is mine. I get to pilot it every day if I want to.”

  “Not sure it’ll fly like that,” Reggie cautioned. “I think that might be why the low gravity for the grand final—to show it off.”

  “Who cares? It handles like a monk from a kung-fu flick—the classic Hong Kong style where they don’t give a shit about physics, not the Hollywood dance fests. And those guns… who’d have thought that all a Particle Blaster needed was a heat sink three times as efficient as anything in the game.”

  “Glad you like it,” a voice said from just behind them. Reggie moved June around in a square-dancing maneuver so they both turned to face the speaker. A young guy with a goatee and gauged earlobes stuck out his hand for a shake. The other held a tankard. “I’m Rajit Sood, technical designer for Armored Souls. I do most of the juggernaut designs, including the Valkyrie.”

  “I enjoy your work,” Reggie informed him. “I do worry that you’ve gone off the rails on this one, though. The Valkyrie might be too good.”

  Rajit bobbed his head. “Yeah. That’s the idea. Fly her loads. Kick some ass in her. Subscribers will be slobbering to sign up for next year’s event.”

  Reggie and June chatted a moment longer before continuing on. He didn’t mind meeting the makers of the game he lived inside, but there were people in this crowd who held the keys to far deeper mysteries than the design rationale behind the Valkyrie-class medium/heavy/insane juggernaut.

  With uniforms in abundance throughout the crowd, Reggie looked at shoulders and counted stars. Three. Three was the number on the army lieutenant general Reggie finally settled on introducing himself to.

  “General,” Reggie said with a salute. He wasn’t sure of the protocol for a dead soldier addressing a general. If he’d been alive and on active duty, he’d never have struck up the conversation at all. “Sgt. Reginald King, US Army, retired.”

  June saluted as well, and the general set his beverage down on a nearby table and returned the salute. “Sgt. King, I’m General Timothy Kamaka. I’d like to say that it’s been a privilege and an honor watching your performance in simulated combat. Your coolness under pressure, your ability to adapt to impossible situations, and your willingness to sacrifice for the mission have reflected admirably on the army and the officers who trained you.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Reggie replied. “It’s all a little easier knowing it isn’t real.”

  “Nonsense,” Gen. Kamaka replied. “I’ve seen your service record. You never shied from doing what needed to be done, regardless of the mission.”

  “About that, sir,” Reggie said. “I was hoping you might be able to answer something for me. Why were there so many teams in the tournament groomed by the military?”

  The general put a hand on Reggie’s shoulder and retrieved his drink with the other. He guided Reggie through the crowd as he spoke. “War changes. Back in the Civil War, rifles were the must-have upgrade that swung the balance of power. By the First World War, there was mustard gas, along with early tanks and planes. We ended the second with the atom bomb. Who knows what war’s going to look like five years from now, let alone twenty, fifty, even a hundred years out? We’ve already got fresh-faced young men and women sitting in fatigues behind computer screens, firing packets of data and shoring up the nation’s cyber-defenses. The Air Force has been flying drones for decades now. One day soon, I think we’re going to be removing as many bodies from harm’s way as we can, and remote operation will be a huge part of that.”

  “So, this was a training program?” Reggie asked dubiously.

  “Think of it more like a proof of concept,” Gen. Kamaka replied. “Games like this can be a proving ground. Our specially trained teams fared well, but I wonder if some of those video game players out there might just be top notch soldiers for the wars ahead, given the right training.”

  A captain sidled up to the general. “Gen. Kamaka, you have a call from Washington.”

  Gen. Kamaka shook Reggie’s hand, then June’s. “Enjoy the party. You two have earned it. I have to be going.”

  Reggie and June watched him leave, vanishing at the doorway rather than walking through.

  “A training exercise?” June asked.

  Reggie shook his head. “Hard to believe, but maybe that’s just because Chase read so much into the timing of it all.”

  June sighed. “Maybe that’s all it ever was: paranoia. Chase wanted to find a conspiracy, so he assembled one from spare coincidences.”

  He looked around the party. Frank was holding court with a bunch of uniformed off
icers, laughing and stuffing his face. Lin’s vivid blue hair made her stand out; Reggie spotted her amid a gaggle of flamboyantly attired young gamer types. Chase was…

  …right next to her.

  In fact, the two of them were arm in arm, laughing and joking with the gaming media over drinks.

  Reggie leaned close to June. “Maybe we can tell him later. Looks like the glacier separating those two might be melting.”

  June snorted laughed. “Seriously? Those two have been sleeping together since Lin came back.”

  “But they—”

  “Yeah, they’re at each other’s throats constantly. That’s just the way they are. Seriously, Reggie, you’re taking this being dead thing a little too far. Real-world love isn’t always pretty to look at from the outside. But I have a better idea: let’s come up with a really incredible conspiracy story to tell Chase before we let him in on the truth.”

  “Sure,” Reggie agreed readily, unable to take his eyes from the spectacle of Chase and Lin not only visibly getting along but trying to picture how they’d been having a relationship under his nose this whole time without him realizing.

  But also, in the back of Reggie’s mind was a worry: Lieutenant generals didn’t divulge classified information over cocktails—or mead—just because some famous sergeant asks them. If there was a conspiracy afoot, Reggie still didn’t have the truth of the matter.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  The following weeks and months slipped slowly back into a familiar routine. The galactic map unfroze, and Wounded Legion got back to the business of dominating a large chunk of it. The congratulatory atmosphere of the immediate tournament aftermath faded. Ghost Platoon became just Alpha Platoon once more, though the nickname came up on occasion when someone wanted to needle Reggie or his friends for acting like superstars.

  The Valkyries dominated battlefields.

  June switched to hers and never looked back. So, did Chase. Lin waffled back and forth between Yulong and her Valkyrie before finally just deciding that the Valkyrie did too many things too well to ignore. Frank didn’t care for his; after a few battles in it, he went back to smashing juggernaut faces with Gremlin.

  Reggie grew conflicted. He avoided naming the Valkyrie in his hangar spot. It was sickeningly, disgustingly good. Piloting it felt like cheating despite all the work he’d put into winning it.

  Eventually, Reggie sprang for the ludicrous 100,000,000Cr to switch back to Command spec and run his faction as a leader and not a crazed war god. He even retired Vortex, purchasing a Yamato and fitting it with massive caliber artillery to run battles from a command center.

  There wasn’t much left to accomplish.

  Wounded Legion ground its way up the faction standings as attrition in subscriptions sapped the top factions of manpower. Fame and a determination to press on as the player base shrank buoyed Wounded Legion’s numbers as the top dogs faded.

  The Armored Souls forums filled with complaints about the direction and stagnation of the game. Players complained about the development team wasting time on tournaments for a handful of players instead of content everyone could enjoy. They complained about the Valkyrie being unfair, elitist, and bad for the game. They complained about AI players winning a tournament, about Ken Bradley playing favorites, and about unannounced elements deciding a grand finals match.

  In short, they complained about everything.

  All the while the subscriber base was shrinking. Valhalla West had other, newer, shinier games in their catalog. Competitors had popped up in the marketplace making claims of better sleep dynamics for players, boosted cognitive performance, and more player choices when it came to avatars.

  Six months after the Ragnarok Showdown ended, Armored Souls announced that it was shutting down.

  Reggie found out first. Ken Bradley showed up at his apartment door one day to break the news in person. “I’m really sorry about this, Reggie. But it’s business. I can’t run servers just for a few players. We’ve been operating at a loss two months running now, and the trend is getting worse.”

  “What happens to me? To us?” Reggie asked.

  Ken held up his hands. “Don’t worry. We’ve got plenty of other games, and no one’s doing anything that will affect your apartment here.”

  The next day, Reggie tried logging into Armored Souls and got an error message:

  UNABLE TO LOG IN; SERVER UNREACHABLE

  ERROR CODE: 0x00000080; AUTO-RELOG ATTEMPT01

  Reggie let it keep trying.

  And trying…

  After auto-relog attempt number 551, he gave up and went back to bed.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  For a time, Reggie played Silent Shuriken as his main pastime. June joined him, and they ran with Chase’s band of merry murderers for a while. Lin played on occasion but mostly just hung out in the universe with Chase; she had bigger games to conquer, ones with a more active viewer base. Her fans had gotten bored of watching Valkyrie antics long before Armored Souls shut down.

  They didn’t see much of Frank anymore. He didn’t care for the eastern vibe of the game and went off to be a pro boxer for a while—entirely digital, of course.

  When Silent Shuriken grew stale, Reggie and June moved on together to an off-road rally-racing game. After that, they spent a few months touring various vacation simulators. For over two years, Reggie became City Baron’s top mayor, managing a little town called Jenova and nurturing it into a global metropolis.

  But those grew stale in time as well. Reggie and June hopped from game to game, always choosing together and leaving when one of them no longer enjoyed it.

  One day, there was a knock at their apartment door, and Ken Bradley was standing outside.

  “What game is it this time?” Reggie asked wearily. Ken stopped by socially once in a while, but the hangdog expression on his face warned of bad news before the Valhalla West CEO could even open his mouth.

  Ken remained silent, unable to look Reggie in the eye. The man had aged. Reggie had always suspected that Ken kept his avatar a mirror of his real-world self; the guy had claimed on many occasions that he didn’t draw much distinction between the real world and his digital playground. The once young, energetic herald of the new frontier in digital gaming had gone gray and sparse across the scalp. His burly frame had sagged to the physique of a beanbag chair. His eyes had lost their eager glimmer.

  “All of them,” he said at last.

  June came up beside Reggie. “All of them… how? What do you mean, all of them? All of what? All the simulation games? All the military sims?”

  Ken wrung his hands. “Valhalla West is shutting down for good.”

  “How?” Reggie demanded. “You have millions of subscribers.”

  “Had,” Ken replied, the hurt plain in his voice. “Lawsuits have eaten into our profits and player base. Even when we win in court, the bad PR hits the bottom line. Parents won’t buy rigs for their kids if they think there’s even a 1 percent chance of aneurysms. The legal team stopped signing off on new titles. Our insurance company won’t cover us anymore, and the only one we found who’ll offer us coverage is asking for so much money we’d be better off paying damages.”

  Reggie felt numb. He’d been in the system so long that time had felt meaningless. Every day was another day toward infinity with the road before him stretching farther than the eye could possibly see. Now… that road ended in a brick wall just the other side of his front door.

  “How soon?” June asked.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “What’s going to happen to us?” Reggie demanded.

  Ken looked up. A bleak smile spread across his face. “We’ve got the latest in crystalline storage. You’ll be preserved for as long as ten thousand years, at least. Maybe someday, someone will have the resources to start up a new server for you. I’m leaving instructions in my will for you all to be taken care of.”

  “In your… will?” Reggie asked. Ken had aged, but he didn’t look to be knocking on deat
h’s door.

  Ken shrugged. “I know. It’s long-term thinking. I’ll do it myself if I ever scrape up the money again. But this might be a longer problem than one man’s lifetime.”

  The three of them commiserated a while before Ken left them to say their goodbyes.

  The door shut, sealing them into their last life raft of digital existence.

  “Reggie, I’m scared,” June admitted. “What’s going to happen to us?”

  Reggie hugged her tight. “I don’t know. We’re dead already. Maybe this is just time to pay the piper. Maybe we finally get to find out what’s next, see where everyone else went straight away. Heck, maybe we’re already there and just don’t know it.”

  The two of them spent the evening making plans for how they’d meet up again in the next life. Having a plan in place made the uncertainty more palatable. They shared one another’s company, each never letting the other out of their sight, right up until the server’s announcement intruded.

  SERVER SHUTDOWN IN 5:00

  Reggie swallowed. He put his arms around June and pulled her close. “This is it.”

  “I don’t want it to be.”

  They waited and watched the time tick down. In any other circumstance, they’d just have relogged to another server. Now, there was no place to go.

  “If we’re more than just stats and digital pixels, there has to be something after this,” Reggie reasoned.

  June nodded. Her sniff told Reggie that she was crying.

  :10

  :09

  :08

  :07

  :06

  :05

  “I love you,” June whispered.

  :04

  “I love you, too,” Reggie whispered back.

  :03

  :02

  :01

  SERVER SHUTDOWN

  REBOOT IN ERROR CODE: 0x99999999