Stormfuhrer

by E. R. Everett

  The soldiers in the truck were talking again. Two of them were talking loudly and there was plenty of laughter, particularly coming from his right side. He turned his avatar’s head to the right by turning the mouse ball slightly clockwise, suppressing the momentary desire to do so with his own head. The man seated next to him was wearing a uniform slightly lighter in color than the others, and on his head was a darker helmet. Seated on the bench across from Hayes and to his right was a soldier who seemed not as jovial as the other two. This soldier stared at Hayes, or rather, at his avatar. He too was dressed in the lighter colored uniform and wore the same a helmet as the man seated to the immediate right of Hayes’ character. Military police?

  A tall, clear bottle of golden liquid was being passed around, but Hayes had no idea what combination of keys was needed to drink anything, so he shook his head subtly as it came his way.

  Richard looked to his left through the tarp’s opening and past the truck’s tailgate. It had begun to rain. The rain seemed to come from above and just to the back of Hayes’ head, tapping against the tarp. The stereo-phonics were amazing! The truck continued to roll through the city, pausing briefly at checkpoints and crossing over bridges. The city’s buildings loomed old and dark.

  He must have looked silly to the characters in the game, jerking this foot and that shoulder, standing up slightly and sitting down, as he tapped keys and then corrected, but if he had seemed odd, it wasn’t noticed, except maybe by the soldier who kept looking at him from his diagonal right.

  Richard decided to try speaking. He pulled the microphone arm of the headphones down over his mouth and spoke in a whisper into the headset microphone. “Testing, testing.” The soldier beside him turned to look in his direction. The others were distracted. “Hello everyone.” This time he spoke clearly. The soldiers looked at him. “'Hello,' he says! Welcome back Mauer. You look like Hundescheiße!” All were either laughing or smiling. Apparently, not every word would be translated.

  After much of the initial confusion, Hayes felt that he was starting to get a feel for the game. An hour had passed, then another. Apparently, keystroke combinations were needed to show emotions, like smiling or anger. A small generic face appeared, in the bottom corner of the screen, when an emotion had been changed, the face reflecting the current emotion and then fading out. And endless combinations existed between the keys, the gloves, and the mouse, causing actions and reactions, though it all seemed quite intuitive. At one point, the soldier across from him asked a question that he didn’t quite catch due to the noise of the truck. He felt that the best thing to do was simply to narrow his eyes in the direction of the opening in pretended exhaustion, but possibly also displaying nausea. The soldiers laughed again and started passing another bottle.

  The events didn’t involve the immediate or constant drama of a first-person shooter. Rather, things happened in real time. One second equaled one second. And no one shot anyone, at least not yet. Also, no one seemed able to do anything beyond what could be done in the real world. He himself couldn’t carry three objects in one hand nor jump any higher or farther than a person could have in real life. Still, it was exciting, mostly because of the reactions in others that his avatar’s actions would cause.

  There came a point at which he wanted to elicit more significant reactions from the others. He had his character focus his eyes on the man in the seat diagonal from him. With the mouse-ball pushed forward, he lean towards the seated figure. He raised and closed his right gloved fist. He saw the same fist on the screen, repeating the same exact actions. He rotated his fist. The fist on the screen responded. The soldier scowled again in his direction. He lunged the fist forward, moving the mouse-ball only a few inches. His whole body went with it as it launched toward the chin of the man. The soldier saw it coming and jerked his head back, missing the punch but clinking his helmeted head against one of the steel braces that supported the truck’s tent enclosure.

  Faintly, “Vas war das?” and loudly in almost the same instant,“What was that?” The man stared at him, confused. The others watched in silence. He chose to try it again, this time with the other arm. Coming from the left side of his body, It reached the soldier but with greater difficulty. The soldier was alert and deflected it with his right hand. The man then stood up and grabbed Hayes by the head with both hands, pressing down, forcing his head to the floor of the truck bed. He hammered down hard on the back of his neck with one hand. Hayes’ character fell flat, the screen was lit up by the flash of a blurry light. A second later and the screen went black. He tried various keys, but nothing moved in the blackness of the screen. He exited his browser back to the desktop and reopened it, putting in the address over and over. Nothing. Finally, the need for sleep overtook him and he closed the browser, dragging himself to the couch.

  After a few hours of sleep, Richard Hayes awoke and placed the headphones back onto his head. He tried numerous times to return to the game, but the black screen remained.

  Richard Hayes lay on the old couch. He forced himself to wait a full thirty minutes between attempts to reopen the browser window at the walküre.allein website. Staring from the couch at the distant beam that held up the a-frame of his roof, Richard realized that it was the complexity, the realism, that must be drawing him to the game. Occasionally, especially when many images had gone by—like when he had looked out from the back of the truck bed into the midst of the city—the screen would lag a bit with tiny freezes, as if the processor in his computer weren't enough to handle the tremendous detail. But in reality the lag had been almost imperceptible, taking away nothing from the experience.

  At first he checked the website every thirty minutes, then every hour. It was twelve hours before he could make something reappear on the screen. One apparently played the role of a German soldier, stationed probably in Munich, by the looks of the buildings and architecture he could somewhat recognize. There was no log-in, no company name, no title screen. Once your browser opened the game, there was a brief fade-in and you were there.

  When Richard Hayes was finally able to return to the game, he had left the truck, was perhaps carried out. He found himself in an infirmary. There were large, high windows behind his bed that were so clean one could eat off them. Everything was spotless. A few nurses were moving silently from bed to bed in what he soon realized was a very long, pillared building. Interesting, but not very exciting. He stood his character up. He was still in a uniform and, from the extreme detail, noticed that it had become very wrinkled.

  It was clear that there really wasn’t much constant action that would justify the repeated playing of this game. But it wasn’t the appeal of bloodshed and heroic moves that eventually had Hayes playing the game over and over, for hours at a time, for days eventually, with little sleep. It was the complexity, the reality of the situation in which his character was involved, the seemingly endless map, the exhaustive research that must have gone into his character’s creation and the creation of the world within which he interacted. Tremendous detail had been put into every little piece of it. Normally in a first-person shooter, a trashcan, for instance, might be a copy of all the other trash cans in the game, but in this game each trash can, for he found himself looking around for such details, was always a bit different from all the others. He could detect no repeated patterns in the textures of objects.

  For weeks, Hayes pulled himself away from the game just long enough to sleep his four hours a night, to make coffee, to feed Fraulein, or to heat up a frozen dinner. Occasionally, Carlos might stop by, but his visits were always brief.

  By early August, Hayes had come to a few realizations about the game. First, the game might be some sort of language-learning program. The longer one stayed into the game, the more German and less English was used by the other characters. Secondly, the characters in the game reacted to the words of the player, usually in a convincing way. Over the weeks, Hayes began responding to his fellow Germans in their language, haltingly at first, often recei
ving some curious looks. He would use German words as he learned them and replace the others with English, often in the same sentence. The word order wasn’t perfect, but he did what he could. At times he could detect a second or two of lag during which a translation program must have been hard at work attempting to transform his words into something usable by the characters in the game. This pause occurred especially when he mixed the words of both languages into the same sentence. Other characters’ reactions then reflected responses more or less appropriate to what he had said, or intended to say. Such complexity. Finally, he learned that everything happened in real time. When his character slept, he had to wait—usually about six or seven hours—before playing the character again. In these instances, the screen would go gray, and he knew that meant sleep. In these instances, he had no control. He simply had to leave the screen where it was and wait for the avatar’s “eyes” to open again. The avatar's character would then awaken and perform movements on his own for a brief moment until finally under Richard's full control.

  The character was SS. He worked in a prison camp that Hayes soon learned was Dachau, the Bavarian camp near Munich, one of the first camps to spring up during the Third Reich. It wasn’t a mass extermination camp. In fact, based on dates he would see on calendars and in newspapers, it was 1939, a few years before the mass deportations and the “final solution” had been formally authorized by Hitler and organized by Adolf Eichmann.

  There was a knock at the door. Richard reluctantly removed the headset and got up to answer it. It was Carlos, his neighbor, carrying a large square box.

  “Hello!” Richard said. Not wishing to appear rude, though every cell in his body wanted to return to the screens. He was still wearing his studded gloves.

  “I just bring this by. Is Monday night. Can I watch?” replied Carlos in his heavily accented voice, a big smile permeating his kind, moustachioed face. It took Richard a second to process, and then he realized that the package was for him. It was about the size of box that might hold a large human head.

  “The game!” persisted Carlos. The game . . . What does he want? Richard stared at Carlos, squinting, vacantly rubbing his balding scalp. The game. “Oh, you mean football?” Monday Night Football. “Well, I did not mean La Loteria!” Carlos laughed good-naturedly, displaying a front tooth rimmed in gold.

  “Of course, my friend, of course! Come in! What’s in the box?”

  “It’s yours. It came to my house.” Richard found it quicker to have things shipped to la casa de Carlos rather than receive the slip in his small mailbox that required him to drive to the post office to receive the bigger packages. Carlos' mailbox was huge. Besides, Carlos could be depended on to show up at least twice a week, if not more frequently, and he trusted Carlos completely, since the hurricane. Once, when Richard was at a staff-development conference in Lubbock, there had been a surprising shift in the direction of Hurricane Minnie. She decided that, instead of driving into the coast of Galveston, she would instead head due west, into the heart of the Rio Grande Valley. She was a vixen from the start, originating as a category three from nearly absolute calm, quickly developing into a category five, even as she reached landfall. When Richard returned home, after the storm had finally declined into a tropical depression, dumping megatons of rain into the Laredo area on its path to oblivion, he found his windows boarded and Fraulein safe in Carlos Fuentes’ home. Though there had been some flooding, not a single pane of glass had been cracked in Richard's cabin. After that, Carlos was a friend without question.

  Carlos made himself at home to a bottle of Corona from the fridge, one of several that he had left there the previous week, while Richard took the box to his corner and cut the shipping tape with a pocket knife. From the box, Richard pulled out a black helmet dripping with shipping peanuts, connecting wires trailing to the floor. This is what he had been waiting for, the perfect interface for pure absorption into the game.

  Carlos flopped onto the couch, followed by Fraulein jumping up to lie at the opposite end, mentioning something by the way about his kids and their friends having taking over the house, while he reached for the remote. Richard detached the audio hook-ups from his computer and tossed the old headset into the square box, stashing it behind his computer table. The shiny, black helmet was a unique find, only $350 through an online auction, new at $850. When all the wires were hooked up, it would display a wide screen inches from the wearer's eyes that wrapped around almost from ear to ear.

  Experimenting with the helmet, he found that he no longer had to use the mouse ball to tilt his head, for with the helmet on, he could tilt his own head and the avatar would do the same. When he turned his head to the left, the image in front of his eyes shifted at nearly the exact same moment, so that the virtual reality almost matched reality itself. Incredibly, the visual experience almost seemed three-dimensional and the audio was faultless. It was truly a thing of beauty.

  Fall 2021

  The summer of his discovery was approaching its bittersweet end. Because of the game and the time it seemed to require of him, he knew he wouldn’t be able to muster the focus needed to prepare for a completely new year. He decided to teach on autopilot as his thoughts, he knew, would be filled daily with the game's most recent scenario. He used the same lesson plans from the year before, which had been honed and choreographed to near perfection from previous years. This school year would involve almost no course preparation on his part, though it would still required him to grade assignments and enter scores into the online grade book that all teachers in his district were required to maintain. A tiny fraction of his own time would be sacrificed. The rest could be devoted to developing his character, his Nazi avatar.

  As the fall semester progressed, however, Richard Hayes began to see the teaching potential behind his new obsession. He himself was learning much about the time period, the details involved in running a labor camp, the relationships between persons of equal and unequal rank. What educational objectives would be gained if students played it during class time, perhaps as an extra incentive? It touched on sociological experiences, psychological, even anthropological ones. He could team up with Perry, the English teacher across the hall, and assign all kinds of projects that allowed students to connect their experiences in the game with the more complicated elements of their own lives. Gods, what social studies objectives wouldn’t be met?

  Still, he doubted that all students would want to play the same avatar. Did they vary from student to student? Doubtful, since there was no log-in of any kind, no sequence of entries that would tell the program who had logged in. They would all play the same avatar—Sturmführer Heinrich Mauer, SS, guard at Dachau. But their differing reactions might cause widely differentiated game results between students, results that could be compared, students' decision-making skills honed through an analysis of their differing reactions to identical stimuli.

  In November, Mr. Hayes decided to give extra credit to a student in desperate need of it. It would be an experiment with the game, an after-school endeavor lasting two weeks. He would have the student open the browser to the site address, as he had done during the earliest days of the summer, and simply watch as the student interacted with the game. The student would perhaps score a point for every day he could stay alive for ten days. The points would simply be added to his six weeks average.

  Richard had twelve computers of various makes and computing speeds that he had collected over the years, with administrative approval, from the classrooms of teachers who had left the district. He sat Marcus at the newest and fastest model, watching over his shoulder. Marcus wore a headset and a somewhat worn pair of studded interactive gloves. He was also given a mouse-ball.

  When the image appeared, his avatar was standing in the middle of a street intersection. The bright sun revealed all the details of the surroundings, the people, the cars. Marcus was startled and made quick movements with the gloves and ball. The character immediately collapsed. Cars of late 1930s make drove
slowly around him. Some beeped their horns, drivers staring as they drove by. One car stopped at a shoulder. A man in a gray coat got out to direct the traffic around him. Richard intervened, taking over the headset, the gloves and the ball. He expertly brought the character to a standing position, “Excuse me.” He had the character smile. “It must be the heat.” The man in the gray coat smiled back and waved as he walked back to his car. The usually soft-spoken Marcus was very impressed, amazedly looking back and forth between Hayes and his avatar on the screen. His mouth was wide open.

  Hayes transferred the interactive devices back to Marcus and taught him the basics, raising his arms and positioning the ball for him until he was able to maintain some control over the character. In twenty minutes, Marcus was directing traffic passably well.

  Knowing what he now knew, Hayes actively sought ways to incorporate the game into his social studies units, ways he could implement gradually, perhaps piloting his ideas in May. With only twelve computers, he would have to rotate students through the stations while perhaps teaching the others regarding the historical background needed to make the best decisions in the game. Planning anything, however, was difficult--there was always the Game. The distraction ate up his spare hours like minutes. It fed on his days.

  Of course, there were many justifications for including the game into his curriculum. Not the least of which was the linguistic slant it gave to his history lessons. Perry, his team-teacher of English across the hall, with whose chronological structure he generally paralleled his own history course, would love that. Certainly by May Perry would be covering 20th century literature, which would work well within the context of the game. Over the last months, Hayes had learned the essentials of the German language very quickly. There was no reason why students couldn’t also be immersed into a second language this way. Perhaps in the years to follow, the game could be introduced early in the school year, about the time when Perry had the seniors studying the Old English epic poem Beowulf, for instance. The German language encountered in the game would provide an excellent Anglo-Saxon linguistic tie-in to the work while Hayes would give them history lessons regarding relevant Saxon and British migrations. There were plenty of English words—originally Old German or Saxon--that survived the later French-Norman invasion of England in 1066. The most frequently used words, in fact, like fish, hand, arm, nose, hair, water, cow, grass, stool, boat, and gold, had their identical or near-identical German equivalents. As far as learning nouns was concerned, German was the easiest language for any English speaker to master.