Wild Fyre

by Ike Hamill

  “That’s the best packaging I’ve ever seen,” Aster said.

  The box contained a solid block of foam with a precise cutout for the part suspended within. It was an electric motor, about the size of Aster’s fist. Around the perimeter of the box, the foam had a border of black and white squares that reminded Aster of the squares on the manufacturing counter in suite ten.

  “Pull another one,” Aster said.

  Ploss stood and grabbed a larger box.

  Inside this one, they found that it also contained a big block of foam. In the foam four wheels with knobby tires were precisely suspended. They had geared cogs on the side and the rims were about four inches in diameter.

  “These look like the wheels I saw on the bottom of that robot,” Aster said.

  “You think they’re making more?”

  “Looks like they have enough parts to make a hundred,” Aster said, standing up and surveying the room.

  “Why wouldn’t they just get these parts in bulk then? Why all the packaging?” Ploss asked.

  “I don’t know,” Aster said. “But there are barcodes on each of these boxes and no plastic or tags on them. They’re ready to use. Maybe it’s easier for the robots to use parts that are wrapped up like this.”

  “I guess,” Ploss said. “You want another?”

  “No, let’s check the next building.”

  Some buildings were empty, and some contained more boxes. They found another that was filled with rows of counters, but it didn’t have any manufacturing or any robots to go along with all the tables.

  In the last building, they found fifteen cars. They were parked in the middle of the floor, three rows of five. Each car was the same dark blue.

  Ploss whistled. “Nice rides. I knew a guy who bought one of these at auction. If you can get one with low miles, they run forever.”

  “They look like undercover cabs,” Aster said.

  “Yeah, but this is the Interceptor package. These Crown Vics have eight cylinders, rear-wheel drive, great suspensions, and a nice bench seat in the back. Old school. You can drive right up over a curb and not spill your coffee.”

  “Why are they in here, and not parked outside?” Aster asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe someone is working on them.”

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Aster said.

  Ploss shrugged.

  “Want to take a look under the hood?”

  “No, let’s get out of here. It’s a long drive back,” Aster said.

  They shut off the lights and left the building. Outside, the rain had picked up so they shuffled fast across the lot and up over the landscaped hill. Aster caught up to Ploss at the side of the road where they waited for a string of trucks to zip by so they could cross.

  Up the road, a car had pulled over into the breakdown lane. When the trucks passed, the headlights on the car came on.

  Aster tapped Ploss’s shoulder. “Isn’t that one of your beloved Crown Vics?”

  The car pulled out onto the road. It was accelerating fast. Ploss began to cross the road but Aster pulled him back.

  “Let’s wait for this car,” Aster said.

  They stepped back from the road and watched the car. Aster was trying to get a look at the driver, but the rain was falling steadily, and the car’s wipers weren’t on.

  “Oh, shit,” Ploss said.

  Aster looked behind himself just in time to see the other Crown Victoria coming from the opposite direction. It had veered out of its lane, crossed the double-yellow line, and was coming right for him. He turned to run. As he crossed the strip of grass and started up the little hill the car’s bumper caught him in the back of the knee.

  Aster’s world went black.

  CH.12.Coders ()

  {

  Fighting();

  /*****

  AUGUST, 2013 (3 WEEKS A.J.)

  Kevin had to pee so badly that his teeth itched. There was no time. The evidence he needed would come in the next thirty seconds, or it would never come. He pushed back an inch from the desk. The six monitors mounted to his wall were all pointed at his chair. He stared at the bottom-center monitor and let the action from the others seep into his peripheral vision.

  The shooter on the screen sprinted down the alley with a sniper rifle in his hands. Kevin’s view was from just behind him, looking over the runner’s shoulder.

  For most people, the sniper rifle would be a disastrous choice in this situation. The pulse gun or minigun would be more appropriate for these tight turns, where an enemy combatant might be around any turn.

  For this person, the sniper rifle was perfect. If this player met an opponent, he would simply use the sniper rifle to shoot the enemy directly in the head, without slowing his run, and seemingly without even aiming. This person, with a sniper rifle in his hands, was nearly a god. Either that, or he was a masterful cheater.

  Kevin pushed back another inch. The man with the sniper rifle was coming to the end of his alley, where he would step out into a massive courtyard. From the other monitors, Kevin knew that the man with the sniper rifle would be ambushed by four armed enemies as soon as he reached that courtyard.

  The man with the sniper rifle broke cover and four guns were instantly trained on him. There was no negotiation. They fired immediately.

  Kevin leaned forward.

  Two rockets were launched from the end of the courtyard. Kevin heard a beep as they locked onto the runner’s target. The runner dodged left and took cover behind a burned out bus. Just as the first rocket hit, the runner shot through the shattered windows of the bus and put a round through the head of the man who had shot the rocket launcher. With one down, the runner left the protection of the bus as the second rocket impacted and rolled the rusty frame over.

  “Whoa,” Kevin said. The action was so fast it was hard to track.

  Two miniguns opened up from either side of the courtyard. The runner took a mild hit in the armor of his thigh. It didn’t slow him down. He rolled forward sprinted in a circle to his left, and then spun. Kevin’s view whirled around. At the instant the man with the first minigun came into view, another shot from the sniper rifle rang out and that man dropped as well. Two down.

  The third shot was so quick after the second, that Kevin thought it was an accident. The gun was barely reloaded when it went off. He saw the third enemy drop. This one didn’t even have time to fire his weapon before the bullet exploded his skull.

  The runner dodged again.

  The final enemy had dropped his minigun and rearmed with a grenade launcher. The weapon was deadly and scarce. It fired off three-round bursts of grenades with incredible speed. The enemy began firing, aiming for the spot the runner was headed to.

  It was a good strategy—even if the runner reached cover, the grenade would turn any debris into deadly shrapnel. The runner turned and shot.

  One, two, three grenades exploded in the air as bullets ripped through them. The final enemy was still waiting for his grenades to reload when the runner’s sniper rifle tore off the top of his head.

  The runner had killed the four who tried to ambush him in the courtyard.

  Kevin typed, “AFK, BRB,” into his chat window—code for “Away from keyboard, be right back.” He ran for the bathroom.

  When he returned to his computer, he heard his headphones from across the room. They were alive with chatter.

  He put on his headphones as he settled back into his chair.

  One of the players quieted the rest, saying, “He’s back, he’s back. Everyone, shut up. Ekted, what’s the verdict?”

  Kevin’s handle was “Mr. Ekted.”

  Kevin delivered his decision. “He’s not botting,” he said.

  Voices erupted through the headphones, some cheering, some disagreeing. Kevin turned down the volume.

  In his world of video games, being accused of “botting” meant that the player had hacked the game to give themselves superhuman capabilities. In this case, everyone thought the runner—a play
er named Dreadnaught—was using an aimbot to allow him to always hit so accurately with the sniper rifle. Kevin, one of the original programmers of the game, was brought in to officiate.

  Finally, the crowd settled down.

  “How can you say that? He just picked off three grenades in midair,” a voice said.

  “There are two modes for the sniper rifle,” Kevin said. He had repeated this explanation several times. It was in the “Frequently Asked Questions” section of the website. “When you zoom in, and you’re looking through the sight, it has a different angular resolution than when you’re shooting from the hip. A hip-shot, up to thirty meters, takes less accuracy to hit than a sighted shot at greater than thirty meters.”

  “I know, but grenades? How is he even leading them?”

  “You don’t have to lead much at such a short distance, and it’s just physics. The human brain is wired to predict trajectories of falling objects,” Kevin said.

  “Nobody else does it,” a new voice said. Dreadnaught had been silent through this.

  “Yeah, they do,” Kevin said. “Watch the finals of the ladder tourney from last year. We only left twenty-five sniper rounds on the map because everyone knows it’s an unbalanced weapon. Until those twenty-five were used up, people were knocking everything out of the air. You shouldn’t play levels with unlimited sniper rounds if you don’t want to get roughed up.”

  The first voice was back. “So your ruling is that Dreadnaught is not a cheater?”

  “I thought I made that clear,” Kevin said. “Yes. My ruling is that Dreadnaught is not a cheater.”

  “Yeah, bitches, eat it,” a new voice said. “You’re just mad because you suck.”

  “Hold on,” Kevin said. “I wasn’t finished. I rule that Dreadnaught is not a cheater. In fact, I rule that Dreadnaught is not even that good.”

  Kevin smiled as a chorus of surprised voices responded to his taunt.

  The headphones went silent.

  “One-vee-one, bitch,” Dreadnaught said.

  “I’ll play you to ten, then I have to go back to work,” Kevin said. “Choose the level.”

  “Dogtown,” Dreadnaught said.

  It was a big map—too big for only two players, and a great level to hide on top of a building and wait. Kevin knew he should decline. He had nothing to prove, and he had too much work to do to wander around in a video game for the next hour. He shook his head and bit his lip. He couldn’t refuse Dogtown. It was his favorite map.

  “Fine,” Kevin said. “No teleporter, no mines, and no turrets.”

  Without the teleporter, Dreadnaught would be limited to only getting on top of one of the few buildings that had ladders, and without the mines or turrets, he couldn’t play a defensive game.

  “Fine,” Dreadnaught said.

  Kevin heard the clicks as the other players left the chat. They were all trying to connect to the game server as observers. The game only allowed thirty-two observers, and those spots would fill quickly. Kevin opened the connection window. He saw that Dreadnaught was already connected.

  Kevin shoved his wireless mouse to the side and grabbed for the one tethered with a cord. He had been playing this game for ten years, ever since he had been on the team that created it, and he had always played with the same mouse. His hand knew this device intimately. He had thousands of hours of experience. Being one of the architects, he was disqualified from competing in the yearly tournaments. If allowed to play, he would dominate.

  The game was counting down. Kevin visualized the map in his head. When the countdown reached zero, he would be in one of eight respawn locations. The game would drop Dreadnaught in another location on the opposite side of the map.

  Kevin exhaled as the screen read, “3… 2… 1…”

  At zero, he turned and shot. Based on single frame rendered on his monitor, his hand knew that Dreadnaught would be in one of two places. He automatically turned to the closer spot and hit the button which pulled the gun’s virtual trigger. There was no need for thought.

  “Headshot!” the game’s automated voice announced.

  The chat window exploded with expletives from the viewers. Most had only been playing for a few years and had never seen anyone of Kevin’s caliber play the game. Kevin heard Dreadnaught respawn and knew from the direction and volume of the sound where his enemy was. He tracked the progress of Dreadnaught in his imagination. After the first kill, Dreadnaught would know where he was, and he would know the fastest way to reach him.

  Kevin aimed for the corner of the building and switched his weapon to rocket launcher. His finger hovered over the right mouse button. When hit, instead of firing the rocket the right button would lob a live shell.

  He imagined Dreadnaught’s pace, working his way down the virtual street, passing the pretend movie theater, nearing the corner. Kevin hit the button and the shell bounced towards the corner. If he were Dreadnaught, he would have heard the “tink, tink, tink” of the bouncing shell and backed away. Dreadnaught was too confident. He rounded the corner and caught the shell right in the chest.

  It exploded. It didn’t quite kill Dreadnaught, but Kevin had already fired a powered round at Dreadnaught’s feet. The second shot finished him off. It was two to zero. Kevin nodded—this might not take as long as he feared.

  He listened closely for Dreadnaught’s respawn, but didn’t hear it.

  The chat window quieted down—everyone was waiting for the next move.

  “U Cheat,” Dreadnaught typed in the window.

  Kevin typed back the standard response, “Playas getting their ass whipped always say that.” Kevin hit a macro key that dumped his game’s autocheck. Not many players used this function. They were all using some kind of mods to customize the game, so their autocheck would show tampering even if they weren’t cheating. But Kevin’s autocheck was clean—he was using a stock install of the game. His autocheck was unimpeachable. That was something Dreadnaught couldn’t claim.

  Several people in the chat window chimed in and validated Kevin’s autocheck.

  “U gonna play?” Kevin typed.

  He heard the respawn. Dreadnaught was either in the subway or over near the gas pumps. Kevin ducked into a doorway and made his way up the steps to the rooftop. He heard Dreadnaught running down the street. There were two ways to run in the game—one was silent, and the other was harder to hit. Dreadnaught was running in the noisy, hard-to-hit way. He was nervous. Kevin smiled.

  Kevin switched to the flak cannon. Its shells couldn’t be sniped, and it caused decent damage even if it only landed next to the enemy. Kevin would need the collateral damage—he wouldn’t be able to hit Dreadnaught precisely with what he had planned. He jumped down from the low roof top and hit the street.

  Dreadnaught held the sniper rifle. He spun to face Kevin and fired a shot. He missed. As far as Kevin knew, this was Dreadnaught’s first miss of the day. Kevin was bouncing his player back and forth and moving too fast to be hit by the sniper rifle. It was an absurd strategy—moving like this, Kevin could never hope to shoot Dreadnaught. He was moving too fast to aim well enough to hit Dreadnaught, who was doing his own fair amount of dodging. But Kevin didn’t need to hit him because he had already switched to the flak cannon.

  Kevin shot his first round and it hit slightly behind Dreadnaught. When it hit the ground, the cannonball exploded, hitting the back of Dreadnaught’s armor with hot shrapnel.

  “That’s about three percent,” Kevin whispered to himself with a frown. “Have to do better than that.”

  Kevin’s screen was a blur as he fired his next shot. He was moving so fast that he was nearly making himself seasick. His eyes couldn’t focus on the target. The cannonball hit the street directly in front of Dreadnaught, doing more damage.

  Dreadnaught fired shot after shot, missing the blur that was Kevin. Dreadnaught struggled to switch weapons. The sniper rifle was such a good weapon that the programmers had sought to penalize its use. Instead of making it less accurate, they mad
e it a slow weapon to put away. As Dreadnaught switched to his own flak cannon, three more balls exploded around him. His health meter was down to fifty-percent before he got off his own shot. It almost hit Kevin, and when it hit the ground, it took away twenty-percent of his health. Dreadnaught had already lost this war of cuts and scrapes. By the time he tried to flee, he didn’t have enough health to escape. Kevin led three to nothing.

  Over the next few minutes, Kevin shamed Dreadnaught with each weapon in his arsenal. Each had different strategies to make them effective, and Kevin was an expert on them all. Dreadnaught caught Kevin with a plasma ball near the end, so the final score was ten to one.

  Before he signed off, Dreadnaught typed, “U2 good.” He was gone.

  Kevin added the name to his watch-list, so he could shadow Dreadnaught’s play in the future. He wanted to see how Dreadnaught had bested him with the plasma ball, and he had forgotten to log the match. He would have to watch him again in the future to adopt his technique.

  The chat window lit up with “mad propz” for Kevin. He thanked the observers and logged off. Kevin didn’t like to play too much these days. He focused on the game too hard, and it took its toll on him physically. As he pushed away from the screen, trying to get his eyes to stop feeling like they had popped out of his head, he changed his mind. As long as he had the game up and running, he figured he might as well check in on the real cheaters.

  He connected to a server unambiguously named, “Cheatz Only!”

  All the servers were regulated to disconnect anyone with any of the known aimbots or hacks, but a server like this was a refuge for people running artificial intelligence, or AI, bots. These were automated players who played by the rules of the game, but were controlled by computers instead of people. Programmers came to this server to test their AI bots against each other and against elite players. Sometimes Kevin dropped in to test his skills and keep them sharp.