by Dan Davis
“Yes, it’s terrible. Now shut up and look. There's your opponent.”
Across the arena, a fifty-meter section of the smoky, swirling wall faded, like a bubble popping in slow motion.
And there was the creature.
It rolled through the wall opening, which closed behind him and it rolled forward. Seeing it on the screen and seeing it before him was completely different. On the screen, it had looked like a bizarre and absurd creature. In person - for Avar was as close as simulacrum as was possible - it was a wholly different feeling.
It was a creature from a nightmare. An unnatural, unknown entity, something with no relationship to anything on earth. Three meters tall, from footpad to footpad. It was massive, weighing perhaps half a ton to a ton on Earth, a little less in the lower gravity of the Orb and the ship.
“That thing is really something,” Ram said. “Looks like a psychotic wind turbine fucked a bunch of bananas.”
“You have a couple of minutes before it reaches you but you should prepare for when it does.”
“What's the deal with the parameters Bediako was talking about?” Ram said, stepping a few paces back and forth while swinging his massive arms around. He kept his eyes on the Wheelhunter the whole time. It was mesmerizing.
Milena, her voice calm, sounded inside his head. “The Wheelhunter top observed speed was estimated as forty kilometers per hour. It accelerates up to that speed in three seconds. Its impact damage is estimated at a range between a thousand and three thousand newtons, depending on the point of impact. Without downgrading these abilities, you would have no chance of survival. Even at thirty percent of baseline speed and strength, you will probably be killed immediately, first of all. In the game.”
It rolled forward, its feet flap-flapping against the smooth black floor with a solid flood.
“That all sounds great. So, what do I do? What abilities does it have?”
“Abilities? It is not constrained by the restrictions they design in enemies in commercial Avar games. It can do anything that it can physically do based on observations of the previous three missions. The version you see before you is programmed with the range of movement that we have seen but we can change the variables so that it can do more than we have seen. But really, we can merely predict based on the limited examples we have and then extrapolate potential behaviors from there. For example, the Wheeler tends to accelerate once it closes to around thirty meters and that is usually how we run these simulations. That doesn’t mean that it will next time.”
“Great.”
The Wheeler was still around a hundred meters away so Ram stepped backward. The great yellow thing rolled on.
“That's right,” Milena said. “Keeping your distance is a perfectly viable strategy.”
Ram kept walking backward. “Do they get tired?”
“No one knows. The battles never last long enough for us to know what stamina it has but presumably the wheel design improves efficiency. It may have limitless endurance for all we know.”
Ram was approaching the wall behind him so he moved sideways along it. The Wheelhunter rolled onto its side, like a bike taking a bend in the road. The arms rolled over and over, the long fingers with their oversized knuckles flexing.
“So I can run around this arena all day and the simulation won't get tired?”
“I can change the parameters if you wish. I can make the Wheeler slow down, tire, become weaker. We do these things with regularity, testing every variable. The AIs have been running simulations for years, with and without human controlled subjects. We have so much data but few factors to feed in at the start. There are so many potential variables that it is difficult to draw firm conclusions.”
“But what are the best strategies assuming that we have seen everything that it can do?” Ram kept his distance and the alien matched his pace. “Surely there are common solutions?”
“Depends on the parameters we set for the alien. Depends on the skills of the subject. With the current settings and your lack of ability, you may as well attempt to tackle it head on.”
“Inspiring, thanks. Okay but it doesn't have a head. What are the weaknesses?”
Ram slowed his retreat a little, allowing the alien to gain on him. It came to within eighty meters.
“We don't know if it has any. Our assumption has often been that the ball and socket joints are the weakest parts of the anatomy.”
“What about the central section? Is that its head?” Ram slowed further, ready to react if he had misjudged the distance but he thought it was about sixty-five meters away.
“The hub is surely where the control takes place. If it has a brain, and it must surely have something like that, then presumably that is where it will be and is well protected. It has eight joints around the outside of it for one thing. That’s a lot of sturdy bone structure. Imagine a pelvis with eight limbs and a brain and all the other organs inside. Must be tough to damage them.”
Ram was beginning to understand why everyone who had faced it before had failed.
“Alright then.”
When the steadily cartwheeling alien reached forty meters away, he took a deep breath.
“Come on, Ram,” Ram said, speaking to himself. “It’s just Avar.”
He sprinted toward the Wheelhunter.
In his chair, in the Avar room, on the spaceship Victory, his body would be barely twitching.
His simulated body was powerful and he charged the distance in just a couple of seconds. The alien covered more than half the distance for him and the thing was upon him. The huge, flat-topped footpads rolled up over Ram's head height, crashing down toward him one after the other, as if mechanized, a conveyor belt. Each foot was bigger than Ram's head, solid and heavy enough to crush his skull like an eggshell.
The skin covering it was a crazy, slightly mottled canary yellow, with mustard splotches and darker patches like an old banana. Tiny bumps, nodules small and large, covered every part. Ram reached up and caught the edge of the next footpad. His hands wrapped around two edges and pushed back, trying to stop it.
It was too much. The weight and momentum of the thing rolled on, pushing down, buckling Ram's arms and knocking him down before he could react. He looked up in time to see a three-fingered hand, each finger with three bony knuckles, come whipping down into his face. The blow knocked him down hard, he fell back off his feet and hit the ground hard, smacking the back of his skull onto the black floor.
The last thing he saw was the underside of the footpad crush his face.
“No!”
His vision whited out and when he came to, he found he had respawned. On the far side of the arena, the wall faded open and the Wheelhunter rolled out again.
Ram was breathing deeply, his mind forgetting momentarily that none of it was real.
“That wasn't bad.” Milena's voice in his head. “I've seen worse first attempts.”
Ram quickly shook off the horror of the first person death experience.
He had a lot of practice.
“If it wasn't for your passionate encouragement, Milena, I don't think I could go on.”
She did not laugh. She was all business. “Next time, try moving your body to one side as you grasp the underside of the foot.”
“Alright.”
“And if you give me a little warning, I can help you by simulating what I would do in real life with your hormones. I'll adjust your strength and speed, replicating the surges of adrenaline and testosterone I can provide to you on the Victory.”
“You sure can.”
“Shut up and concentrate,” she said but
Time passed strangely in Avar. Another way in which the technology is like a dream state. One can sometimes spend what seems to be hours deep within only to find mere minutes have passed in the real world. Likewise, a full day could pass in the blink of an eye but your Avar settings or your rumbling belly will let you know that you should eat, drink and urinate. That first session in the Orb arena simulati
on, Ram went without a break for eight hours. Another record on the UNOPS Victory.
Inside, he and Milena ran through techniques, different approaches, angles of attack. Milena paused the Wheeler in motion a hundred times so Ram could get a close look at the way it moved, its point of balance at any one moment, the range of motion in each of its joints. He died thirty-four times but it was never enough.
“I have to stop,” Milena said, yawning in his ear. “And so should you. You need to eat regularly to maintain your muscle mass. It's dinner time.”
“Already? Can we just try one more thing?” Ram had not done enough, he was sure. He had died so many times, he had barely landed any significant kicks, punches or holds on the alien all day.
“I'm sorry, Ram,” Milena said. “I never could keep up with you. Not that anybody could. We'll pick it up again in a couple of days. Tomorrow I think you have sparring. Real world sparring. You should get some rest.”
He hesitated. He really wanted to have some sort of victory to go back to the barracks with. He needed it. “I'll be okay by myself for a while, you can go eat.”
“No,” Milena said, her patience clearly evaporated. “I'm about to disconnect you. You won't be able to play. And listen, I hope you're feeling pretty good right now. You should be. You've done some good work here today, I can't wait to work on more tactics with you. But this is the virtual world and you've got real world problems to deal with. Just now, while you were training, one of the other drivers came in and told me that Mael and his followers are going to try to injure you tomorrow. They'll break one of your limbs, put you in the medical center. Maybe worse.”
“Fuck.” Ram forgot the alien.
The arena gamespace dissolved and Ram found himself in the empty lobby.
“What should I do?” He disconnected, transitioned back into his body.
“You're going to have to try to hospitalize one of them first, before they can do you. Scare them off.”
“Hospitalize one of them?” Ram sighed, suddenly feeling tired. “In sparring? Come on, seriously?”
“If you have to do it in sparring, I suppose you might get lucky. But I'd suggest you try breaking into one of their rooms tonight, break a leg or an arm, smash their face in a little. Maybe Jun’s, she’s the smallest and she sleeps heavily.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“It’s time for you to stop hesitating. Stop looking for a way out. This is your reality, they have their sights set on you, you must attack first. Considering what happened to Samira, it might be the only way you get out of this alive.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN – LOVE
They applauded him when he walked into the mess hall. Most of them were laughing, some kindly, some with open malice. Clearly, it had already become a sort of in-joke with the subjects to do this. It was clear that they lacked proper entertainment.
Eating at his bench, Mael fixed Ram with his typical leer and leaned sideways to mutter something to Genesis. The American woman laughed and nodded deliberated at Ram, curling her lip as she did so. Ram turned his back on them as he marched to retrieve his food.
All the while, the place between his shoulder blades squirming at the thought of them stabbing him in the back with a plastic piece of cutlery.
“Thank you for the sarcastic applause,” Ram said as he sat down at Alina, Te and Sifa’s table with his vast mounds of food. Pasta with a chili tomato sauce plus a loaf of unleavened bread the size of Alina's anterior deltoid. “What did I do this time?”
“What do you mean sarcastic?” Sifa said, as if she was genuinely confused.
“You were in that thing for eight hours straight, man,” Te said.
“So?” He wasn’t really listening. The thought of having to attack one of Mael’s men was distracting.
“We do four-hour sessions in Avar,” Sifa said.
“Four hours?” Ram asked, glancing at Mael from under his eyebrows. “How come it’s so short?”
Te and Sifa exchanged a look. Alina had her massive upper body hunched over her dinner and kept pounding it down without looking up.
Sifa answered. “Our Avar performance peaks after the first hour and then starts dropping after three. A lot of us are clutching it out from even before then.”
“Why's that, though? It's not as if you can get tired in Avar.”
Te scoffed. “Are you crazy? It tires your mind, doesn't it? You're still thinking, focusing, hard for hours. All your focus, all your mental strength focused on the moment. All the mental computations your brain is carrying out is focused on what is happening right now and also projecting into the future, constantly assessing variables and recalculating, adapting. It is a hyper-alert state. You know what we mean, you've been there.”
Ram nodded. “Okay.” He glanced sideways at Jun, who was guzzling her protein shake. Could he really break into her room and snap her leg in the night? He didn’t think he had it in him.
“He doesn't understand,” Sifa said to Te. “Rama Seti, all of us here, apart from you, are used to fighting in the real world.”
“Sure.” Jun might have been the shortest subject but she was still around 7 feet tall and she was stocky like a rhino. And she could easily throw him across the room and break him in half if she caught him.
“Real world fights don't last long,” Sifa was explaining. “We're from all different fighting leagues and we are used to specific rules. Some of them have three rounds that last for two or three minutes each. Others favor ten or fifteen rounds but usually they get boring by the end so they're not so popular. Eziz and Te used to do unlimited fights, no rounds, no time limit. How long did they last, Te?”
“My record was forty-one minutes but a few went over an hour. Most were between one and twelve minutes long. At those kinds of intensities, it doesn’t matter how fit you are, you just get too tired.”
“Physically tired,” Ram said, pointing with his spoon. “You don’t get mentally exhausted.”
“But we do,” Sifa said. “Which is why we are limited to four hours in the Avar. We are not used to concentrating at that intensity for that long. And yet you do it so easily. Obviously, it's your experience doing it for a profession but it is still impressive. We were watching you after we finished, you were really going for it. You died so many times, that takes a toll, too, even though we know it's not real. So, that's why we were applauding you and it was not sarcasm.”
“I see,” Ram said, cautiously. “It is easy for me, you’re right and I could have kept going. Reason I didn't is because Milena pulled me out.”
“Oh yeah?” Te said, nudging Sifa. “I wish Milena would pull me out, know what I’m saying? Tasty little piece, that bird, yeah you guys know what I’m saying.”
Sifa elbowed him in the chest. “It is good that she stopped your session, she is taking care of your mental health.”
“Listen,” Ram said, leaning forward and lowering his voice. “I have to tell you something. It wasn't that. She said the other drivers had warned her about something. An attack. On me. Mael and his crazies are going to do me, probably tonight. They're going to cripple me, put me out of action. Fuck me up for good.”
Alina tensed at once, her head shot up, blue eyes burning bright. “They cannot stand to see anyone but Mael succeed,” she said, her voice a hiss. “They are fanatics. It is for the human race, they say. All morality must be put aside so that the great Mael can save humanity from destruction. The fools. Is that what humanity is about, is it?”
Te whispered back at her. “Alina, you know my feelings about those fuckers but I kind of agree with their thinking. We all do, right? That’s what we’re doing with this whole mission. We're all putting everything aside, our futures and our ethics included, so that humanity can keep on making whatever stupid decisions it wants to make.”
Alina looked for a moment as if she wanted to crush Te's face in.
Instead, she relaxed, rolled her head with her eyes closed. When she opened them, she appeared in control of
herself again.
“You can each of you do what you wish,” she said, speaking deliberately. “I am not putting aside my own humanity in order to save everyone else. I will not do so.”
Te clearly disagreed and started to say so but Sifa placed one huge, long-fingered hand upon his arm and he fell silent.
Ram ventured a question. “If you feel that way, Alina, if you don’t mind me asking, why did you even sign up to this?”
She snorted a mirthless laugh. “Believe me, Rama Seti, I ask myself this question more every day that I am on this ship.”
Sifa spoke in a low, even tone. “Forget ethics, what about this warning from Milena?”
“They can’t get into my room,” Ram said. “Not with the doors locked.”
Alina jumped in. “Electronically controlled locks are worthless. They may be able to override the doors.”
Te sneered. “Shut up, Alina, Mael can’t do that. If he could do that he would have done it already, stop trying to bring him into your little circle of paranoia, will you?”
“I had locks on my apartment back in Delhi. Best money could buy, pretty much. Somehow I still ended up here.”
“Alright then, mate, what are you going to do if they do come for you?”
Ram sighed. “Try to hurt one of them before they come for me. I reckon I can land a few blows, maybe hurt someone bad enough that I gain their respect.”
Te and Sifa shook their heads. Alina turned away in disgust.
“Bro, seriously.”
“You would only make it worse.”
“Right but Milena says I have to try.”
“You couldn’t hurt any of them, no offense, brother. They’d fucking mash up your biscuits.”
“You need to protect yourself,” Sifa said.
Ram sighed. “Yeah, okay. Maybe I can, I don't know, maybe I can stay somewhere else tonight?” Ram tried to avoid looking at Sifa but he failed.