Man Vs Machine

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  “Watch the simulation,” That was Dr. Alfredsen, the shorter, fatter one of the two scientists. He pointed one pudgy finger at the wall-to-wall plasma screen hung at the front of the room. On it, the digitized version of Hayden dove behind cover and picked off enemies with an effortless grace. He seemed to have a preternatural awareness of where hostiles might be coming from, spinning and laying them low with ruthless economy. As he watched, Hayden put three shots into the center of mass of one enemy, then rolled behind a rock formation and lobbed a grenade that caught a truckful of hostile soldiers as they were disembarking. They scattered, but not fast enough, and the grenade exploded in their midst. Another roll, another burst of fire, and what looked to be the last enemies standing went down.

  Sergeant Pietro glanced left and right. Everyone else in the room was staring intently at the screen, Major Gerard’s knuckles white on the back of the chair he was gripping. “This is it,” he muttered. “Come on, you stupid thing, let this be it.”

  Onscreen, virtual-Hayden rose warily and scanned the horizon for enemies. None were visible, but he didn’t relax his vigilance.

  For ten seconds, there was silence.

  In the eleventh, all hell broke loose. A series of deafening explosions clawed at the dirt near where Hayden’s avatar stood, sending him scrambling, half-leaping for cover. An instant later, a second round of shells slammed into the rock and dirt near where he was hiding, blasting huge furrows in the earth. Showers of dirt clattered down as razor-sharp shards of rock ricocheted and flew. Onscreen, Hayden poked his head up and nearly lost it for his trouble as a third wave of mortar shells came screaming in, gouging deeper into the rock with each explosion. As the smoke from the impact cleared, the shapes of men could be seen through the haze, rifles in hand, cautiously advancing.

  “Not bad,” Pietro said. “Those mortars are real enough—”

  “The mortars are the problem,” Alfredsen objected, and Major Gerard didn’t stop him. “We didn’t program any into the simulation.”

  “Didn’t program them in? Then how?” Pietro looked from the scientists faces to the screen and back again. “Those are mortar shells,” he said, stabbing a finger at the monitor. “Somehow they got in there, and they got in right. And you mean to tell me that you didn’t put them in? Come on, what sort of bullshit do you expect me to swallow, just ’cause I’m a dumb old soldier boy?” He surged up out of his chair and took one step toward the frightened scientists. As one, they scuffled back.

  “That’s why we needed someone good at video games,” Gerard said wearily. “We didn’t put the mortars in. The simulation cooked those up itself. It just added them one day, clear out of the blue. Nearly gave a bunch of fellas out of Bragg heart attacks.” He shook his head. “And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Whoever that scrawny little bastard is, I wouldn’t want to be him.”

  Helplessly, Pietro felt his eyes return to the screen.

  This, Hayden decided, was nuts. Onscreen, his virtual self hugged the dirt in what could only be described as a death grip, not daring to peek out from behind his stony shelter lest another blast catch him at exactly the wrong moment. For his part, Hayden stood motionless, just in front of the pillar that marked the middle of the room. His hands gripped the controller; his thumbs moved frantically. Otherwise, he was a statue, wide-eyed and wide-eared, listening for the whistling whine that would tell him another mortar barrage was on the way, or the stealthy tromp-tromptromp that would hint at a more immediate threat.

  He heard the footfalls, froze, and listened. It sounded like maybe a dozen men, multiple fire teams sent out to find him and finish the job. He could hear orders shouted in Arabic or some other language he didn’t know, then a different pattern of slow steps.

  His ears told the story, straight and true. The bastards knew where he was and were trying to flank him. If he stayed where he was, he’d be caught and cut to ribbons. If he ran for it, they had an open firing lane on his escape route. And if he attacked . . .

  He grinned and ran his fingers over the webbing of his belt (or thought he did; his eyes registered the green numbers at the bottom of the screen that might have been a user interface, might have been an ammo count, might have been a lot of things. The lines between Hayden-on-the-floor and Hayden-on-the-screen were definitely getting a little too blurry for the original’s taste.). Two fragmentation grenades left. That ought to be enough, he thought. And if not, well, screw what Pietro said. It’s not a simulation. It’s just a game.

  He reached down/shifted his thumb to the grenade button and pulled the pin/pressed it down. A silent count in his head, one-two-three and oh Jesus, and he lobbed it like a softball/released the button, switching his rifle into his hands/cycling through his weapon inventory, waiting for the moment to rise up/switch stances and open fire/open fire on his enemies . . .

  “It’s fucking ballet,” Major Gerard said, and nobody contradicted him. Onscreen, Hayden was wading through the remnants of the enemy forces. The first grenade had taken out most of one of the enemy patrols, and while the survivors were still scrambling for cover, he’d found their position and raked it with fire. Shouts indicated that the other fire team had realized what was going on and was preparing to open fire, but even as they did so, Hayden threw himself down on the sand, and the bullets whizzed harmlessly overhead. He rolled left, taking cover behind a small pile of rocks. He squeezed off a burst that went nowhere but made his attackers pull their heads down, then half-rose and picked two off before cutting back right in a series of jagged zig-zags. Angry shouts and a chatter of rifle fire rose from the remaining enemies, but they aimed wide, and Hayden was able to throw himself behind some sturdier cover with bloodless grace.

  Pietro frowned. “So he’s good at a video game. Really good. What’s the big deal?”

  Alfredsen looked at his partner and got an expression of “I did it last time.” He turned to Gerard, eyes wide and pleading. “Major?”

  “Fine.” Gerard stuck a pen cap in his mouth and chewed it furiously for perhaps three seconds. “What would you say if I told you that the simulation should have ended before the mortar barrage?”

  “I don’t know,” Pietro said, and considered the problem for a moment. “Probably that someone screwed up.”

  “No one screwed up,” Gerard said. “The programming is perfect. Every other simulator in the army works fine. It’s just this one.”

  A deep breath, a blink; Pietro resolutely refused to believe what he was sure Gerard was about to say. “Someone hacked it, then,” he offered as an explanation. “Built in some new features.”

  Alfredsen shook his head. “We wiped the system and reinstalled from gold master and got the same results. We installed the masters from here onto a half-dozen other systems and got nothing like this. The simulator here is unique. What it does is unique. What it does—”

  “—is impossible,” interrupted Alfredsen’s partner. “It shouldn’t be doing any of this. Not the mortars, not the extra soldiers, not the new objectives—none of it.”

  “So the line I fed Hayden about it keeping going until it beat you and analyzed your weakness . . .”

  “Was bullshit, yes,” finished Gerard. “It keeps going because it wants to, and it won’t stop until it’s beaten you, any way it can.”

  The infantry had broken and run, but now there was the grinding hum of enemy vehicles chewing their way through the sand toward him. He could smell the diesel fumes leaking off them, an oily overlay to the sharp gunsmoke drifting across the battlefield.

  Olfactory generation technology, Hayden told himself. Triggered releases. Don’t let yourself immerse too far, don’t let yourself get dragged in.

  He scuttled back to the bodies of the second fire-team and scavenged three grenades and a pistol, which he took as a replacement for the one he’d lost earlier. The men of the first team were beyond hope, recognition, or usefulness, and he let them be.

  He had no idea what he’d do to counter even light armor. Sho
ot the tires, he supposed, then roll a frag grenade underneath and hope for the best. Pop the guys inside as they tried to clamber out. He counted his rounds, twice, and both times came up with “not enough.” He’d have to take a rifle, some cheap-ass AK-74 knockoff from one of the dead men. That would mean abandoning the M4 when his current mag ran out, but it would allow him to scavenge ammo, and right now that was more important than the little extra bit of stopping power the M4 gave him.

  With his off hand, he reached for one of the abandoned rifles dded the item to his inventory. With it close at hand, he moved the M4 into firing position and sighted on the driver of the jeep leading the column of APCs down the road and toward him.

  Squeeze the trigger/press the button, he told himself. Gently, now . . .

  “You’re telling me the fucking thing wants to win? Who cares? Let it win!” Pietro was beside himself. “Hayden’s right! It’s video game!”

  Gerard shook his head. “Negative on that. We need to know what happened here, and why, and one of the steps in figuring that out is seeing what happens when this thing loses.” He took another painfully hard chomp on the pen, then pulled it out of his mouth and stared at it, almost surprised. “It hasn’t lost yet, you know.”

  Pietro blinked. “Never?”

  “Never.” There was a smile hidden somewhere in Alfredsen’s face. “Every single soldier who has used that simulator has found himself in a rapidly escalating situation that eventually overwhelmed him. We had you warn Hayden, more or less, so he’d keep fighting. If he knew it was supposed to stop, it would provide a fatal break in his immersion, and he’d lose.”

  His eyes flicked up to the screen, where virtual-Hayden had somehow managed to commandeer an enemy APC and was turning the guns of the M113 on the other vehicles. “Fatal?”

  “No, no, not like that,” Seymour said hurriedly. “It just gets them killed in the simulation.”

  “In the game,” Alfredsen corrected him.

  “Whatever. They lose. And we don’t want him to lose.”

  He shrugged. “I still don’t see what the big deal is. So he loses.”

  Gerard harrumphed deep in his throat, then tossed the pen down on the table in front of him. “If we knew it were just this simulator, Sergeant, you’d be right. But we don’t. We don’t know how this started. We don’t know if it will spread. We can’t imagine what would happen if, say, some fire control systems decided in the field that they wanted to play. So we need to figure out what’s going on and how to deal with it, and the first step is beating it, if for no other reason than to prove that we can.”

  “But you shouldn’t be able to,” Pietro said softly. “It controls the simulation. It should be able to make its soldiers 100% accurate and make Hayden miss or fall down or God knows what every time. It should be over in one shot.”

  “Ah,” said Seymour, and he barely had the decency to look embarrassed. “You see, it’s made a decision. That wouldn’t be fair.”

  The pain in his leg was not, could not be real, Hayden told himself. Just the side effect of playing one serious mindfuck of a tactical shooter. “Not even first person,” he muttered to himself, and tsked at the invisible gods of war who’d made that decision.

  Behind him, the wreck of his commandeered M113 still smoldered. Around it were the smoking corpses of its victims, the other members of the column laid out by fire and steel as if to escort it to the underworld. He’d barely escaped before the noble little vehicle had blown half its back end off, and he had not gotten out unscathed. Shrapnel had caught him behind the knee of his right leg, and he’d barely been able to stagger to cover while the wreck blazed merrily away.

  The M4 was long gone, emptied in the initial suicidal assault that had won him the APC. One grenade was left to him, along with a half-empty AK-74 and the pistol he’d scrounged off a dead man. There were no corpses near the little stand of broken stone he’d dragged himself to, and none that he thought he could reach to scavenge before his enemies returned. He would, he decided as the sound of marching feet imposed itself on his hearing, simply have to make do.

  Major Gerard frowned. “I think this is it,” he said, and murmurs of sympathy from the scientists echoed around the room. Not too much sympathy, though, Pietro noticed. Part of them, he suspected, was still rooting for their insane little machine.

  “What do you want me to do, sir?” Fontana asked. Pietro blinked. He hadn’t been sure the man could talk.

  “Nothing,” Gerard said resignedly. “We have to let it play out to the bitter end.”

  “I’m not sure he’s done yet,” Pietro said. “Don’t bury the man without checking his pulse first.”

  Seymour exploded. “He’s wounded, he’s almost out of ammunition, and the system has just spawned in . . .” he paused dramatically.

  “Thirty-six,” Fontana announced.

  “Thank you. Thirty-six new enemies. There’s no way he can survive.”

  “We’ll see,” Pietro said. “By the way, you never explained why you had him pretending to be a soldier.”

  Alfredsen at least looked embarrassed when he answered. “That was Major Gerard’s idea. He didn’t want anyone knowing that the Army couldn’t beat its own trainer, so he wanted the man who did it to at least be identified as a soldier.” He threw a glance over his shoulder at the frowning Gerard. “You actually spoiled that, I think.”

  Pietro opened his mouth to reply, but Fontana interjected. “Subject is engaged,” he said. It was all he needed to.

  A man fell, bleeding, as Hayden tossed the now-empty rifle aside. He should have let them get closer before opening fire, he told himself. Then he could have taken their guns. It was a tactical error for which he’d pay the price.

  His leg throbbed with unholy pain, and he could see the blood seeping through the impromptu bandage he’d set on the savage cut. At the rate he was bleeding out, all his enemies had to do was wait.

  They weren’t that smart, however, or perhaps the simulation just wanted to seize victory rather than receive it. There was a barked order in the distance, and then a hail of cover fire forced him to hug the ground. They were coming, and this would be the end. They would not, he had long since decided, take him alive—the pistol would see to that. But until that became a necessity, he’d see how many of the bastards he could send to hell ahead of him to announce his arrival.

  “Grenade away,” Fontana announced, unnecessarily, as everyone was watching the monitor. “He’s down to seven shots in the pistol.”

  Pietro looked around. Major Gerard was gripping the arms of his chair as if he could somehow will Hayden to victory. Seymour was impassive, a proud paternal smirk showing oh-so-faintly at the corner of his mouth. Alfredsen was fairly bouncing up and down in his excitement.

  “Six shots. Enemy down. Five. Four. Another man down. They’re closing on his position.”

  Fontana sounded tense. Pietro wondered how many times he’d been through this. How many soldiers he’d seen fail.

  “Three,” Fontana said. Pietro nodded, and lifted his eyes to the monitor.

  Two shots left, and they’d better count. That’s what Hayden told himself. The enemy was creeping up on his position, moving behind cover of rocks and broken vehicles and the corpses of their comrades. They’d have him soon enough, though with a few more of their number gone. (Wiped, he told himself. Recycled polygons. Hang onto that. Therein somehow lies salvation.)

  A face poked up, uncomfortably close, and he turned and fired into it. The man went backwards with a hole where the bridge of his nose used to be and an agonized squeal leaking from his lips. Another man jumped up and charged, perhaps to avenge his friend, and Hayden took him with a bullet to the throat.

  One left, he thought. Time to end it before they get me.

  He put the barrel of the pistol in his mouth, the taste of grit and oil and smoke all mingling. He held it there a moment, wondering what game over would be like, marveling at the simulation that would let him do this, ashamed
that he’d lost, and then pulled the trigger.

  It clicked emptily.

  “No,” he said, and popped the magazine. Sure enough, there was nothing left. Impossible, he thought wildly. He’d counted the bullets earlier, he’d counted them as he fired. There should have been one left. One for him. But the system had removed it, had denied him escape.

  Somehow, he knew, it wanted to win. And that meant that the fucking thing was cheating.

  “You little bastard,” he muttered, and closed his eyes. Shut out the lie. Shut out the sim. Concentrate on what’s real.

  His hands clutched the plastic of the controller, now slick with sweat. He squeezed it, nearly dropped it, caught it and nearly dropped it again. He could hear the men moving closer to his position onscreen, knew that the game was about to be over and that he was going to lose. Was going to be cheated.

  “He’s done for, sir,” Fontana said.

  Major Gerard nodded. “Too bad.”

  “He’s got one—no, he’s got zero. He’s out. Must be a glitch in the system.”

  “Something like that,” Pietro said, and waited.

  The controller. He held it, clutched it like a talisman. It was his link with the game, the thing that let him dive into its world, the one thing that could control another’s actions inside the simulation.

  “The one thing . . .”

  The words trailed off even as he spoke them. He looked at the device in his hands, the product of untold time and money and effort and driven purpose. Nodded once to it, as a warrior might have nodded to a sword to be set aside after long years of service.