“I’ll stay put,” Reggie snapped at the Rhino pilot. “You get in there and help with that Vulture.”
To his relief, the Rhino did just that.
[Secondary Objective: Destroy Enemy Juggernauts 95/662]
Reggie checked the assault team’s numbers. They’d come with 402 juggernauts. They had 472 left. By his quick math, they were still outnumbered, but the odds were slowly shifting in their favor.
Diablo climbed to its feet after Chase and the Rhino pilot disposed of the daring Vulture. The red-painted mech looked as if it’d been left in the toaster too long.
“You’re out of the fighting,” Reggie radioed Chase. “Backup and command duties only.”
“Roger that,” Chase said with a weary huff. “Not a lot of armor left on this thing as it is.”
The Wounded Legion Alliance closed in on the city center like a noose.
[Secondary Objective: Destroy Enemy Juggernauts 114/662]
[Secondary Objective: Destroy Enemy Juggernauts 125/662]
They still had 465 juggernauts of their own left fighting.
Some of the tallest skyscrapers Reggie had seen in game loomed on all sides, making New York look like a suburb. The streets became canyons. And without the long straight stretches Manhattan was known for, the sight lines were all blind. Reggie had to rely entirely on the mini-map and updates from the other juggernauts in his vicinity for intel on anything beyond a block or two from his location.
The Rhino pilot was still puppy-dogging Vortex, following wherever he went. It was a mild annoyance until it bumped into him from behind.
“Watch where you’re—”
“Look out, sir!” the Rhino pilot shouted.
A Phoenix slammed to the ground beside him, having jumped down from the rooftops high above and barely surviving thanks to Jump Boost.
Chase fired Plasma Launchers at it.
Phoenix[37] Left Leg: 4/20
Phoenix[37] Left Leg: Destroyed
Reggie brought down his Ninjato, hacking off an arm after landing two quick blows. The Rhino finished off the Phoenix with a stomp.
[Secondary Objective: Destroy Enemy Juggernauts 126/662]
Then a Crow fell from the rooftops.
Then a Wyvern.
Both narrowly missed Vortex, clearly intent on crushing him to earn the 2,000,000Cr bounty.
Chase and the Rhino finished off both.
[Secondary Objective: Destroy Enemy Juggernauts 128/662]
“Reggie, move!” Chase shouted.
This time, Reggie spotted the falling Lion. How the heavy juggernaut had gotten to the top of one of those skyscrapers was anyone’s guess. Props to the guy, though. Reggie tried to dodge, but a mid-air burst of Jump Boost and the Lion pilot adjusted his fall.
Reggie’s game went blank.
Chapter Sixty-One
UNABLE TO LOG OUT; USER BODY NOT AVAILABLE
ERROR CODE: 0x00000020; AUTO-RELOG ATTEMPT01
UNABLE TO LOG OUT; USER BODY NOT AVAILABLE
ERROR CODE: 0x00000020; AUTO-RELOG ATTEMPT02
UNABLE TO LOG OUT; USER BODY NOT AVAILABLE
ERROR CODE: 0x00000020; AUTO-RELOG ATTEMPT03
>
Reggie held his breath—or tried. He lacked a body of any sort. The text floated through his consciousness like a dream. The ominous, blinking prompt terrified him with its vague promise of obedience intermixed with the lack of any suggested course of action.
“Relog?” Reggie asked tentatively.
> RELOG
The words appeared without typing, as if an unseen secretary was taking his dictation.
REBOOT; SYSTEM RELOG IN PROCESS
PERSONALITY BACKUP SYNCHRONIZING
SYNCHRONIZING
SYNCHRONIZING
PERSONALITY BACKUP MATCHED
DIGITAL ARCHIVE COPY SAVED
RESUMING…
[Relog options: Apartment - Armored Souls - Silent Shuriken - More Options]
The familiar options had barely popped up into Reggie’s consciousness before he leaped to press “Apartment.”
The world went dark once more.
Chapter Sixty-Two
Reggie’s apartment wasn’t there. Or at least, that wasn’t where Reggie ended up after selecting it from his options to relog.
He was seated on the end of his bed in the hospital where he’d first awakened following his battlefield injury. While it wasn’t the real world, it was at least familiar, if not a welcome change of venue.
Dr. Zimmerman knocked on the open door to alert Reggie of his presence before stepping inside. “Hello, Sgt. King,” he said with that smile he wore like part of the uniform.
“What am I doing here, Doc?” Reggie asked. “I was getting some weird error messages between getting fragged in Armored Souls and winding up here. Had me worried for a minute there.”
Footsteps outside the door preceded the entry of Ken Bradley. He looked out of place in this simulation, wearing an Armored Souls promotional T-shirt and baggy jeans. “I can field that one.”
“Are you sure?” Zimmerman asked. “This really is more my department.”
Heeled shoes clacked on the hard, cold hospital floors, and June entered the room, dressed in her nurse’s uniform. “What happened? Reggie wasn’t supposed to be back here? I thought you were going to find a quiet time to take him aside.”
“We ran into a technical glitch,” Zimmerman said.
“What glitch?” Reggie asked, worried that somehow he wasn’t going to be able to get back to Armored Souls.
“It’s not a glitch!” Ken Bradley shouted, silencing everyone. “We brought a guy back from the dead!” He covered his face in his hands and paced the room. “It was all theoretical. It was pie-in-the-sky.”
Reggie felt light-headed. Was this really possible? “You’re talking about Frank, right?” he asked. “Frank died, and you managed to use your techno witch-doctoring to resuscitate him?”
June sat gingerly on the bed beside Reggie and took his hand. “It’s you, Reggie. You died.”
He looked down at himself. There was nothing he saw that wasn’t a computer simulation, he knew. It wasn’t the reassuring anchoring point to reality that he’d hoped for. But if there was one thing that he knew wasn’t a simulation, it was his own mind.
“I’m real.”
June looked him in the eye. Those deep green pinpoints of hope that he could lose himself inside looked so real. So real…
“You are,” June assured him. “You’re as real as any of us.”
Reggie pointed out the window, even though there was no direction that truly aimed back toward the physical world. “But out there, I’m…” he couldn’t say it.
Dr. Zimmerman nodded. “Yes. You’re dead.”
“When did it happen?” Reggie asked.
Dr. Zimmerman tapped on his tablet. “By your reckoning of time, about the point where you were coordinating an assault on Nibelheim.”
June drew him into a hug. “I’m so sorry, Reggie.” He could hear the tears in her voice.
Tentatively, Reggie wrapped his arms around her, feeling the warmth of her body through the fabric of her uniform. Simulated. Every feeling, every sensation, fed into a digital algorithm in a computer somewhere, continuing to lie to Reggie that he was still alive.
“How?” was the only question he could formulate. Then he came up with a second, more relevant one. “Why?”
Ken Bradley talked with his hands, gesturing manically. “Here’s the thing. We don’t know how. We tried. It worked. We’ve got a million—well, really, a trillion—scans of your brain. It’s a learning algorithm. Feed it enough data, and it replicates patterns. It extrapolates. It… behaves like a human brain. It kinda shit the bed when you died in game, but we dove right in and patched it manually. Shouldn’t happen again.”
“You didn’t answer why,” Reggie said firmly. “Why? WHY?” He shrugged loose from June’s embrace and crossed the room in a dash to grab Ken Bradley by the shir
t collar and slam him against the wall. “Tell me why you stole my mind and put it in a jar!”
Ken took Reggie firmly by the sides and lifted him as easily as if he were a child, completely unfazed by Reggie’s outburst. “Calm down. Let me explain,” he said, setting Reggie down on his feet beside June. “This is it. This is big. Like, capital ‘B’ big. Up until now, people have been oohing and ahing over a read-only medium. We get simple commands from a human mind. We provide sensory feedback in return. It’s a loop, but that loop has to go through living tissue. Living brain matter.”
Dr. Zimmerman stepped in. “Let me have a try. June here lost her legs some time ago—I know she told you. She had prosthetics in the real world. Does that make her, what… 85 percent human?”
“Of course, not,” Reggie snapped, glaring at Ken Bradley and his “I wrote this world” super strength out of the corner of his eye. “But that’s not—”
“What if she’d lost both arms, too?” Zimmerman asked. “Only 75 percent human? 60?”
“Hey,” June objected. “I’m sitting right here.”
Zimmerman ignored her. “What about soldiers who wind up with a plate in their skull or missing an eye?”
“I’m not missing a part,” Reggie shouted. “I’m dead! All of me is dead.”
Zimmerman’s eyes lit as if Reggie had just caught hold of the threat he was spooling through this labyrinthine explanation. “Yes. Exactly. And until now, we didn’t have a prosthesis for that.” He clasped his hands together earnestly. “Because June and all those other soldiers who came back missing part of themselves… what made them who they are is still there: their personality, their memories, their essence.”
“Their souls?” Reggie asked.
Zimmerman shook his head. “I’m no theologian. I can’t answer that for you. But what I know is this. Here. Now. In this room, you are every bit as much a human being as the rest of us.” He surprised Reggie by suddenly grabbing the sides of his head. “In here, you are alive, thinking, pondering, feeling the rip tide of emotions threatening to sweep you under. I’ll help with that. I’m trained for that. Let Ken’s people wonder how they did it and give themselves rotator cuff injuries patting themselves on the back. You, me, and if you’d like, June, can all help you through this.”
Reggie hung his head. The fake world was spinning around him. “I… I’d always harbored this dream that there would be a cure someday. It might have been years down the road, but I’d wake up like Dorothy after visiting Oz. I’d look up some of my buddies from the game and meet them in real life. I’d… I’d track down June Mallet in the flesh and thank her properly for all she’d done for me. But this… I’m not sure I’m ready for it. I’m not sure this is for me if I’ve got no hope of getting out again.”
Zimmerman and Ken exchanged a look.
“What?” Reggie demanded. “What was that about? Is there something else going on here? What’s the deal?”
Zimmerman patted the air with his hands. “Calm down. It’ll all be fine. There’s no use acting rashly. For now, it might be best if you just went back to Armored Souls and carried on same as ever.”
Rubbing his eyes, he looked at Zimmerman again, in case this was a joke. “Same as ever? I died! There’s no going back to the way things were before, now.”
June took Reggie by the hand and guided him onto the bed beside her. Zimmerman sat down opposite her.
“There are two options for you,” Zimmerman said with deadly earnestness. “You can go back to Armored Souls—or any of the other games, for that matter, including your apartment—or you can remain here in the simulated hospital environment, and you can receive more traditional treatment.”
Reggie sniffed once and wiped his eyes. “What if… what if you just let me… you know… move on? I lost plenty of good men, and none of them got a second chance. I don’t deserve any different than they got. If Sunday School was right, there’s a bunch of guys I wouldn’t mind seeing again, maybe owe some apologies to.”
Zimmerman let out a long sigh. “I’m afraid that isn’t one of your options.”
Reggie scowled. “Why not? It’s my life, dammit.”
Even if he didn’t really want to find out what came next, Reggie resented the idea that it wasn’t his call.
Ken Bradley stepped in. “We’re on a military contract,” he explained. “Top brass are big on this idea of prosthetic soldiers. They can recruit bodies at any high school or strip mall, but turning that body into a solider is big bucks. When you start talking Rangers, SEALs, fighter pilots… I mean, a good fighter pilot costs as much the plane he flies. They hate losing that investment. If they can back you guys up…”
“That’s neither here nor there,” Zimmerman cut it. “The bottom line is: the US Army has put a lot of money behind this project and you don’t get to pull the plug on it. And you shouldn’t want to. You’re being given a gift, a unique second chance. It’s like a retirement theme park with behind-the-curtain access. You ever get sick of Armored Souls, play Silent Shuriken. Ninjas not your thing? Run a bar in Business Mogul. Don’t fancy the corporate life? Be bigger than life in Jukebox Hero.”
Reggie wanted to scream, to sob, to burst out like a sabotaged dam and drown the city below in his fury and frustration. What right did they have to do this to him? Who decided that Valhalla West got to play God?
Standing and shoving back Zimmerman as he attempted to follow, Reggie stalked over to the hospital window and tore the curtains aside. Beyond the glass stretched a grassy lawn and lines of leafy trees afire with fall colors. A parking lot off to one side was filled with cars of makes and models that looked vaguely familiar yet not. Probably something to do with how long he’d been in a coma, missing out on new model years.
“If you wanted to make all those trees barren, put snow on the ground out there, how hard would that be?” Reggie asked. As he watched, the leaves melted from the trees like watercolor. Swirling winds blew past the windows, and when Reggie blinked at the sudden bright white, the world had been grasped by the frozen embrace of winter.
“About that hard,” Ken said.
Reggie turned to look at him. “This is the afterlife I get? Your sandbox? I get to be your little lab rat, and you decide on the maze?”
“Nothing of the sort,” Zimmerman answered the question Reggie had posed to Ken. “We’ll monitor your mental health, but this is a long-term study, not a lab experiment. Between check-ins, your life in the Valhalla West ecosystem is yours to do with as you see fit. Be the man you want to be. See the sights, win the battles, live the life of a hero or a villain, an adventurer or an inventor. You have the time, and nothing’s stopping you.”
Reggie’d had it with both of them. He turned to June. “Is this why you were acting funny? You knew?”
“Last time I died and got forced out, I checked in on you,” June said quietly. “I didn’t know what to say to a dead man. I guess you’re an exception though, in more ways than I know how to count.”
“What do you think I should do?” Reggie said. “Act like nothing happened? Just go back to playing games all the time? Doesn’t it feel like the afterlife should be more than that?”
June smiled sadly. “I’ve never seen you happier than running military operations. Why shouldn’t that be what you get to do with your life, afterlife or otherwise?”
That was a good question. What would Reggie have chosen for himself? Beer and football round the clock? He had that in the rec room or Seattle Lite anytime he wanted. Another chance with Daisy? No, not that. Other women? There was an app for that. But that wasn’t his style.
Reggie looked June in the eye. She didn’t flinch.
War games where no one got hurt or killed. A woman who was there for him even when he turned her away time and again.
“Can we keep this quiet?” Reggie asked somberly. “I don’t know how people will react if they know I’m just an advanced AI at this point.”
June’s lopsided smile told Reggie the answer
before she said a word. “Frank got back into the game three days ago, and he found out from this side.”
“Sorry,” Ken said. “That was my bad.”
Reggie sighed. “And because it’s Frank…”
“Yeah,” June said. “Everyone knows.”
“Wait. Hold on. Three days ago?” Reggie asked. “How long was that glitch?”
Ken spread his hands. “We debugged a dead player in under a week. I’m calling that a win for the quality team.”
“Don’t worry,” June said, putting an arm around Reggie’s shoulder. “We didn’t finish the war without you. But we have been taking care of business.” She tapped some unseen console commands in the air, but at the end of them, Reggie’s relog screen came up.
[Relog options: Apartment - Armored Souls - Silent Shuriken - More Options]
Reggie’s finger was halfway to touching the button for Armored Souls when he paused. He had, quite literally, nothing to lose. “Want to come by my place first?”
June nodded, and Reggie tapped the button for “Apartment” instead.
Chapter Sixty-Three
Reggie logged back into Armored Souls hours later feeling like a million bucks. He’d decided he was a lottery winner. His name had gotten scratched off the Grim Reaper’s hit list without him being properly collected. Reggie had dodged a bullet that even Neo couldn’t.
He had to believe that because to believe otherwise might drive him insane.
The less Reggie considered that he had been reduced to a self-aware learning algorithm, the better his chances of leading some kind of life in the simulation. His solution was to throw himself back into the war effort with abandon.
“How we doing, people?” Reggie called out as he entered the War Room in the Green Zone. “Let’s have a look at that map.”
There were cheers and claps on the back, many from people Reggie didn’t even recognize. Chase hugged him. To his surprise, even Lin hugged him. Frank came up with a firm handshake and a greeting of “welcome to the club.”
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