Kris nodded. It hurt too much to try to talk. With her uninjured hand, she wiped at the spittle at the corners of her mouth, her eyes half-lidded as she probed at the puffy, bruised flesh.
Pauli came in as Doc was packing up. “You look like hell,” he said as the door closed behind Doc.
“Thanks,” she managed. It sounded like “Ahnkthh.”
“Hey, it’s a compliment. Two days ago, you looked dead.” He was staring at her strangely. “Look . . . I was down by Port Gate this morning,” he said. “Two of the Port cops stopped me, grabbed me hard and took me down when I tried to run. I thought, shit, here we go . . .” He shrugged. “But they gave me this. Said I was to give it to you . . . and told me that they’d find me if I didn’t. So here.”
He held out a comdisk. Kris could see the charge light flickering next to the tiny lens. When she didn’t immediately reach out to take it, he placed it on the table next to the bottle of NoPain. “You want me to turn it on for you?”
Kris didn’t answer. She touched the disk.
The disk hissed and a mist formed over it, coalescing slowly into Serena’s features as she turned toward Kris—all her injuries invisible, the silver skin flawless and perfect. “Hello, Kris,” she said. She bit at her lower lip with perfect white teeth as she stared at Kris with those huge, brilliant eyes. The lip remained unchanged under the pressure of her teeth. “I’m so sorry. They shouldn’t have . . .”
“I’m an unmod,” Kris answered, trying not to slur the words too badly. “What the hell did you expect?”
“Kris . . .” A long breath. “I will always be grateful for what you did. I’ll never forget it. I can’t ever pay you back for that. But I wanted you to know.”
“Good. Now I know. As your friend said to me when he left, have a great life.” She reached toward the disk.
“Wait,” Serena said. “I said I can’t ever pay you back, but I can try. Kris, I’m leaving tomorrow for L5. I’ll be back here in two years. If you’ll come to Port Gate tomorrow and give my name to Security, they’ll take you to one of the change-clinics. I’ve made arrangements for the payments. They can Alter you, Kris. By the time I come back, you’ll be ready. I’ll take you with me. We can see what’s out there together.”
Kris stared at the face in the mist.
She slapped at the comdisk. The mist faded and fell like quiet rain, taking Serena forever with it. The disk beeped and went silent.
“What the hell are you doing?” Pauli shouted. “Did you hear that, Kris? She said you could be like her.”
“I heard her,” Kris told him, “and we already are.”
From where she stood on the port wall, she could glimpse the ships through the smog haze, but the thunder of their voices was muted and gentled. A trio of false suns: The fire in their bellies made the haze briefly incandescent, as the suns rose too quickly and too straight into the sky, to dwindle and vanish at the zenith.
She watched them until the crackle and thunder had faded and the sounds of Walltown rose behind her. She wondered what it would feel like, riding the fire.
“You! Get the hell down from there!”
Kris glanced down. On the Port side of the wall, an armored figure glared up at her, face invisible behind smoked glass, his weapon carefully held where he could raise it in an instant but not quite pointed at her.
“Down!” the voice repeated. “Now!” She didn’t move. She stared at him.
Then, deliberately and very slowly, she turned her back on the guard, the ships, and the port, and climbed back down the far side into Walltown.
Killer App
By Richard E. Dansky
Richard E. Dansky has written in just about every medium imaginable, from having a hand in creating role-playing games and sourcebooks like Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Wild West and Exalted, to scripting the video game Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, to publishing fantasy novels, short stories, and articles about H.P Lovecraft. A graduate of Wesleyan University and Boston College, he is a member of the Horror Writers’ Association and the International Game Developers Association.
The thing they handed the man who’d introduced himself as Pfc. Thomas Hayden didn’t look much like a gun. Truth be told, it didn’t look like much of anything at all.
Made of black plastic, it was fat and banana-shaped, smooth to the touch and almost comfortable in the hands. Two small joysticks protruded from what was presumably its top, and a rash of buttons covered the area the joysticks didn’t. A small knob, presumably an antenna, jutted off one side, and entire thing felt warm, as if someone else had been holding it in the not-too-distant past.
“This looks like a game controller,” he said, and twiddled the joysticks with his thumbs experimentally. “I mean, this looks like a game controller, Sergeant!”
The man standing next to him smiled a thin-lipped smile. It was not a friendly smile, but his face—angular, weathered, and grim—was not one designed for much friendliness. Indeed, nothing about Lee Pietro, from his massive frame to his scarred hands to the sergeant’s stripes on his shoulders, was designed to promote even the slightest hints of intimacy, bonhomie, or general good-feeling.
“Correction, soldier.” The words were uttered in something just short of a bellow, and they bounced around the mostly lightless concrete box they stood in. “What you are holding is a state of the art handheld interactive feedback device as calibrated to the unique demands of the latest iteration of online immersive battlefield simulators. And be careful with it, seeing as it’s the only one we’ve got and if you break it, there’s not another one out there that can make this thing go. You got that, soldier?”
Private Hayden blinked. Took a step back. Twiddled the thumbsticks. And looked up at the sergeant.
“No,” he said. “Does this mean I don’t get to play?”
Sergeant Pietro sighed. Hayden was not his idea of a soldier—to be honest, he wasn’t sure whose idea of a soldier the boy was. He was skinny, with a face like a stretch of gravel road and ears like saucers, long legs and long arms that had made his uniform look like it was hung on a bent wire hanger, and fingers that were damn near long enough to have an extra joint. How he’d survived basic was one of the world’s great mysteries, and Pietro wasn’t sure he wanted to solve it. Still, the brass had assigned him to this particular training detail, and they’d assigned Pietro to babysit him while he did whatever he was supposed to be capable of doing.
“Look, soldier,” he said, in a tone that might have been recognized as kindly by someone who was both inclined to be generous and the product of having been raised by wolves, “what you are about to step into is a dynamic tactical simulation, generated over several years at taxpayer expense to train soldiers like you”—he winced—“for battlefield combat without risk of injury or the use of expensive ammunition. It may look like a game. It may sound like a game. That thing you’re holding in your hand may also be used for a game. But trust me when I tell you that this is dead serious.”
“So I just can’t call it a game. Is that the deal?” Hayden hopped from foot to foot, then jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the heavy metal door set into the wall behind him. “Is the system in there?”
“Yes,” Pietro said. “The simulator is in there. And why they picked your sorry ass to use it is beyond me.”
Hayden grinned, a sickly thing. “Oh, that’s easy. I used to be a nationally ranked cyber-athlete. I played video games for a living.”
He stopped, paused, and then added, “Sarge.” And with that, he turned and opened the doorway into the dark room beyond.
The first thing Hayden noticed about the simulation chamber—he didn’t quite feel comfortable calling it a game room, not yet—was that it was large. It extended a full forty feet from the door he’d entered, and it was easily that wide as well. The floors were covered in a sort of thick padding, covered in something that could only be Astroturf, and the walls were painted a shimmery silvery-white, no doubt to serve as projection sc
reens. Nowhere did he see windows; nowhere did he see another way out. Recessed lights in the ceiling shone down, dull yellow and twenty feet over his head.
And in the center of the room, a single column rose up out of the floor, topped off with a bulbous, iridescent globe of black glass perhaps seven feet off the floor. The skin of the sphere caught the room’s dim light and swirled it around in oil-slick rainbows, while the pillar it sat on was a much less exciting flavor of dull gray plastic, wrapped in even duller padding.
Hayden reached up and touched the globe. It was warm, almost uncomfortably so, and the loops and whorls of color on its surface swam and eddied around where he’d marked it with his finger.
“I wouldn’t do that,” came Sergeant Pietro’s voice from a hidden speaker. “That little sucker gets mighty hot when I turn the simulation on.”
“Wha?” Startled, Hayden took an involuntary step back and nearly dropped the input device. “What do you mean it gets hot? And where the hell are you?” He scanned the room, looking for windows, a camera, anything that would give away Pietro’s location.
“I’m in the control center down the hall, if you really need to know. System fail-safes don’t let you activate it from inside the room.” He paused for dramatic effect. “That way, there’s always someone outside the sim to shut it down if something goes wrong. It’s a good idea, don’t you think, private?”
“I guess.” Hayden took a few steps around the room, his head craned upward. “I still don’t get this setup, though. Where’s the chair? And what’s with the big black marble.”
Pietro didn’t respond. Instead, a low hum filled the simulation room, and the dim ceiling lights faded almost to invisibility. Inside the black bulb atop the pedestal, a dull, throbbing glow began to pulse, even as images flickered across the walls and ceiling. Hayden could make out figures, soldiers in uniform and wide-eyed civilians, buildings standing and in ruins, vast desert vistas and dense, wet jungle, tanks and APCs and unmanned drones and God alone knew what else, all jumbled up in a visual soup that moved and danced faster than the eye could follow.
“Hang on a minute.” Pietro sounded disgusted with himself. There was a sharp click, and then the images froze.
Despite himself, Hayden gasped. What surrounded him was a vast desert vista, red rocks on orange sand stretching seamlessly as far as the eye could see. Off in the distance—just forty feet, his mind told him, but damn if it didn’t look a mile and a half instead—a low ridge of rocks cut the skyline and held it. A small lizard, caught mid-scuttle, hung there, waiting for the simulation to restore it to life. And just in front of the ridgeline, there hung a thin banner of raised dust that said vehicles were coming this way.
It was perfect. It was impossible. Each grain of sand shone, sparkled, reflected light perfectly. Each scale on the lizard was drawn with unimaginable detail and care. It was life, captured and tamed and thrown onto the wall of this one room. As a soldier, he was impressed. As a gamer long frustrated with the limitations of this console and that one, he thought he’d weep.
“Pay attention, son. Your jaw’s hanging open, and Uncle Sam doesn’t need you drooling on the fake grass.” Pietro’s voice was dry with amusement. “Let me explain a few things to you, and you can start your first run through the simulator.”
Hayden shook his head, trying to clear it from the immensity of the scene before him. Hidden cameras, probably pinholes built into the walls, he told himself. Mikes, too. They need to record everything happens in here. It only makes sense . . . He looked down at the controller in his hands. Probably all sorts of feedback sensors in there, too. Something to measure how much he sweated, how hard he hit the buttons and who knew what else.
“Nice setup,” he croaked. “You said first run. How many am I going to make?”
Pietro’s voice crackled through the speakers. “Never you mind that,” he said. “Here’s the deal. When I activate the simulation again, your avatar will appear dead in front of you. You will use that controller to work through your avatar to interact with your environment, engage the enemy using proper tactics, and seize control of the battlefield. While doing so, you will prevent your avatar from being shot or otherwise incapacitated by units of the virtual opposing force. Should you fail in this task, the simulation will come to an end and you will be judged to have failed. Should you succeed in your objectives, the simulation will provide an increasing series of challenges until such time as the limits of your capacity are reached. When you finally fail—and you will fail, soldier—we will figure out what did it, and try to prepare you for that eventuality in the field.”
There was a loud click, and the figure of a soldier in digital camo faded in, right where Pietro had promised. In his arms he cradled an M4 carbine, and he rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet as if eager for action. “Hold still,” Pietro cautioned, and then suddenly the face on the figure shifted, twisting and pulling until suddenly Hayden found himself looking up at himself. A more robust version of himself, he found himself admitting, but there could be no mistaking who the soldier was supposed to be.
“Cute,” he called up to the unseen, watching Pietro.
“You must have, what, a dozen digital cameras in here to get the morphing on the face right, yeah? I thought so. That’s not how you’re going to impress me.”
“No, son,” Pietro answered. “You’re supposed to impress me. I’ve frozen the sim—”
“—to give me a little time to get used to the controls. Yeah, yeah, I get it.”
“I hope like hell you don’t talk this way to your regular sergeant, son,” Pietro grumbled. “Give a signal when you’re ready for insertion, and it’ll be go time. Good luck,” he added, and cut the connection.
“I don’t, sir,” Hayden grumbled, and addressed the control configuration. A few quick strides took him to the spot directly in front of the pillar, where he gazed up at his virtual self in admiration. The controls were simple enough, he found—basic movement and look covered by the thumbsticks, with firing, reload, and weapons swap cycles handled through the buttons in a semi-intuitive pattern.
He’d heard about simulators like this, of course. Every tactical shooter fan had read a half-dozen press releases from various companies bragging about how the military had used their game as a supplementary trainer, or how the Army had bought some engine or other to develop a simulation. These stories always went away in a matter of weeks, only to be replaced by the next one, and eventually he’d stopped paying attention.
Apparently the Army hadn’t, however, and he was impressed with what they’d done. Experimentally, he made his onscreen character dive, roll, and run while crouched. The animations on the character were smooth and flawless, the details on the characters perfect. Experimentally he squeezed off a couple of rounds, and felt the corners of his mouth quirk in pleasure as the spent brass spiraled down, gleaming in the sunlight.
“Whoever did this,” he shouted up at Pietro and the ceiling, “deserves a bonus. Let ’er rip, Sarge.” He flipped a salute at the unseen watchers, then planted himself, legs shoulder-width apart and posture easy, with the controller held out in front of him. Eyes on the screen above, he waited.
Precisely fifteen seconds later, all hell broke loose above him, which was just the way he liked it.
“I don’t care what you say, that boy is not a soldier.” Pietro let go of the microphone and sat back in his chair. To his left, a skinny man in what might have been someone’s idea of a uniform poked at the buttons on a large console. Behind him, in full uniform, was a crewcutted slab of muscle and sinew who’d been introduced as Major Gerard, of the Army Simulation Exercise Initiative. With him were a couple of eggheads in white lab coats named Alfredsen and Seymour; they’d shaken his hand and then started fluttering around the control room doing whatever it was that scientists on the military payroll did to look busy for their paymasters. There had been other brass there besides Gerard, but they’d all made their introductions and then left the tin
y control room, making Pietro wondering what the hell was going on and why the hell they’d asked for him.
The soldier at the console had said nothing, merely operated the simulation according to the scientists’ instructions. He’d said nothing, merely nodded his head when introduced as Corporal Fontana, and then gone back to his work.
“Why do you say that, Sergeant?” asked the taller of the two scientists. Seymour, Pietro decided. He had the defensive quaver of a man who was the author of a not-so-great idea, and Pietro was instantly certain that the masquerade had been his pet idea, for one reason or another.
“Oh, come on. He doesn’t have any respect for rank or the uniform, he mouths off, and he doesn’t know how to address a sergeant half the time. A skinny little bastard like that isn’t mouthing off to anyone after a week of basic, never mind the full nine. Besides, he looks like he’d fall over if you handed him a firearm.”
Seymour frowned, his chin nearly bobbing down to the lapels of his coat as his head rocked in time with his words. “You’re right, I’m afraid. There just wasn’t anyone in the ranks we could use, not for this.”
Pietro sat up. “I beg your pardon? You mean to tell me that the straw man back there was better than any man in the U.S. Army?”
“In almost anything else, Sergeant, you’d be correct,” Major Gerard didn’t sound any happier than he did. “There’s almost nothing he can do that every single man in ranks can do better. Unfortunately, that leaves one thing where he’s the best in the world.”
“Oh, God, no.” Pietro sat up. “Don’t tell me.”
Major Gerard stared intently at a spot on the floor. “We needed someone who could play video games very, very well, Sergeant. Right now, the whys and wherefores don’t concern you.”
Pietro was up and out of his chair before he knew what he was doing. “The hell they don’t. Why have that sorry sack of shit pretend he’s a soldier if all you need is . . . is . . .” His mind searched for the term. “If he’s just some goddamned beta tester.”
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