by Gard Skinner
What a life.
Or was it even life?
It might have been death. None of us really had a clue. None of us really cared, either.
Not until Dakota started asking hard questions.
Level 3
Our shift came up, like it always did, at around 1600. That’s about when day workers come home from their slog and begin a lifelong quest to avoid reality and live inside video games instead. God bless ’em.
From four till about dinner, then for much of the night, those were prime duty hours. And that was when my regiment was on duty. Team Phoenix. Not to brag—OK, to brag—we’re the best. We’re the next-generation, cutting-edge, biggest, baddest group of kickass NPC AI mother-crushers that ever played game. We’ve got game. No, we are the game. We’re the top team.
There were others. A vet named Rio ran a solid crew, kind of like us, but focused on previous-generation servers. She was tough. Two-dimensional attack strategies, but tough nonetheless.
Another guy, Lima, had a tight squad. Great at hand-to-hand, melee, the up-close-and-personal wetwork. Syd, Dub, Scow . . . I knew most of them, but my team topped every stat.
We played prime hours, the newest games, on the toughest settings, and we won more than most. Not all the time, obviously, but we won.
You wanted to be a real gamer? You had to beat my crew, day in and day out, across all the platforms, across all the games, and then, maybe then, you’d be pretty good.
There’d been a new release of SLAUGHTER RACE EXTREME! the day before, so it was no surprise we spent most of the shift in the cockpit of cross-country war machines, blasting our way from one coast to the next. The open scenery was great, city after city, all postnuclear, of course. No closed-in walls of an orbiting prison or abandoned outpost tonight. Freedom to speed. We were the band of evil slavers that had to be defeated by the Democratic Resistance.
Every vehicle had weapons. Some had rocket launchers. On the back of mine, Mi was manning—ha ha, womanning—a mini-gun from a rotating turret. We had a good run. The only real problem was she kept kicking me in the back of the head every time she spun to shoot cars on our six.
Side note here: Mi’s hit rate was over 90 percent that day. She was popping gamer heads and kneecaps like they were water balloons filled with red dye.
Because of her accuracy alone, we lasted all the way to Vegas before someone laid a trap and we ran over a huge IED. BOOM! The concussion sent us a mile into the air, splitting our rig clean in two.
Mi’s half tumbled away from the blast, back in the direction we’d come. And when I landed, I actually hit pretty soft, spun a 180, and limped my battered machine toward where she’d cratered in.
Bet you never saw game villains do that, right? Go back for one of their own?
“You should have left me here to bleed out,” Mi moaned, red goop pouring through broken teeth like drool from a baby’s mouth.
“I wouldn’t leave you.” I smiled, knowing that she’d played her last level today. “I’ll always come back for someone who, well . . . shoots as dead straight as you.”
We could both see a heat seeker approaching from the south, arcing over, locked on, smoke trail a long curve and coming down to end it for us. Nice and quick. No way to run, nowhere to hide.
Flash of light. Then the explosion.
Woke up in reassimilation . . . Re-Sim . . . Like always, got a drink of water, quick bite to eat, and back on the road. Lots of miles to cover. Didn’t seem like the gamers, whoever they were, had a curfew to worry about.
Late night, most of the younger gamers go to bed—we can tell because the voices change—so you’d think the violent gaming would die down. Think again. Those tend to be grownup hours. The language, the brutality . . . we really get to see what evil lurks in the hearts of men. Women. Grandparents. We see some cold, cold stuff.
So late night, new orders: SAVAGE SEWERS. We were back to the desolate wasteland, assigned to mutant duty in the radioactive tunnels below Old Denver. At least as intelligent monsters we could coordinate an attack on the Peacekeepers. (As usual, our minions—the zombie undead—had to just shamble from tunnel to tunnel, eating gamer bullets one after another. Sucked to be them.)
Mutant York had the idea of using our zombie horde as a diversion. Good call. York’s what we call a “Stop ’n’ Thinker.” Always takes an extra microsecond to analyze before he hacks ’n’ slashes. That’s a good quality to have on any team.
While ma-and-pa video-game addicts were shooting York’s decoys, we got Mi and Reno in behind their position. There were six gamers playing co-op over their controllers—from the voice chatter I caught that they were all part of the same hoity-toity country club during the day—and we took them out quite a few times before they figured out our strategy.
Then, the last run, those tennis moms and squash dads figured out where our hidey-hole was and went to the locker to switch up weapons. Flamethrowers. Ouch. They cooked us good.
As we were all roasting, skin peeling away like sheets sliding off a bed, we could pick up their cross talk:
“Burn those mutants, Sally! Burn ’em all!”
“Hoo ha ha ha ha ha!”
“Shhhh! Don’t wake up the kids.”
“It’s so real!”
“Look at ’em twitch! I can almost smell the flesh!”
“Hey, speaking of the undead, don’t we have that PTA thing tomorrow?”
“Toast ’em! Light those creeps up! Extra crispy!”
“The PTA?”
“No! More zombies are shuffling in!”
Sometimes the parents of teenage gamers are even more twisted than the teenage gamers themselves.
Next to me, as we lay there smoking, flames roasting our bones, I could hear Dakota groaning. “Owwwwwww. Owwwwwwww. This place just sucks . . .”
Level 4
She was right, to a point. Getting burned and shot and blown up a dozen times a day has its drawbacks. On the positive side, our health plan is great. The BlackStar Re-Sim machines run without a hitch. They always put all the parts back in the right place.
BlackStar owns video gaming. You know that. They’re the planet’s largest manufacturer. It’s what they do. It’s all they do. On every continent, in every home. Hundreds—no, thousands of titles. Everything from sims to MMO to RPG to puzzle to football to hockey to sweet little games for sweet little kids to big open-world butcher-fests for anyone who can legally buy the discs.
Legally buy the discs . . . Ha ha. Good one.
So that was our day. Every day. Between eight and sixteen hours on, playing the most advanced, CPU-intensive games as the bad guys, getting blown to smithereens. Then eight hours off. But we never worked more than sixteen a day. Not once in all the years I’d been running this regiment.
It makes sense to me. We had a job to do, but we need a break from time to time. You can’t just surround yourself with all that mayhem 24-7 and not have it twist you all up, even if it is graphically generated. No brain can take that kind of intensity.
“I hate it,” Dakota was saying that night. Man, she’d been pushing my buttons ever since she was assigned.
Reno, I think, was also fed up with her moaning. It was an honor to be on our team. Why not act like it?
He told her, “You know, you could be a thousand other places, Dakota. You could be a mischievous frog in FAIRYLAND ADVENTURES or a banana peel in BARBIE KART or even just a lowly ghost in ULTRA PACMAN. How boring is that? Floating the same pattern in the same maze over and over again throughout eternity? You should be proud to be up here with us.”
“I am,” Mi said, squeezing my arm. She likes me a lot, by the way. She likes this team. Good fighter. Follows orders. Zero whining.
I like Mi too. What’s not to like? She’s a stud athlete, hot from head to toe, and did I mention the ZERO WHINING part?
“Plus,” York added, “we get to play the fun games. Best weapons. Best tech. Best worlds. And we get to wipe out the gamers almost as often a
s they incinerate us. We send them back to their checkpoints with their tails tucked tight!”
“Right on!” Reno agreed, fist-bumping his buddy.
“Dead straight,” York continued. “Do other teams get to play next-gen games? None that I know of. They give us the most wicked bombs and vehicles and let us try to outsmart and outgun the best players on the net.”
“That there’s a fact,” Reno said.
“But”—Dakota was used to standing up for herself, that there was obvious—“you idiots just don’t get it, do you?”
Idiots? I started to smirk but caught myself. I should keep a straight face. They all look up to me and act like I act. After all, I’m senior guy around here. I’ve got a role to play, same as them. Usually it’s combat leader. Other times it’s more like father to squabbling kids.
“Idiots?” Reno howled at Dakota.
“Right, idiots,” she repeated. “Are you too much of a meathead to be aware of what’s going on?”
“Aware?”
“They’re using you! BlackStar’s making a fortune off us dying every few minutes or hours, then patching us up, then tearing us apart again!”
“So?” York asked.
“Yeah, so?” Reno echoed again. “This job’s a whole lot more fun than flipping dog burgers or asking if people want fries with their chicken parts.”
“I couldn’t do that,” York said.
“Me neither,” Mi agreed, still clutching my arm. “By the way, anyone check the stats lately? See whose accuracy rating now leads all BlackStar NPCs and gamers worldwide?”
I’d checked.
Mi rocked, no doubt about it.
That’s my girl.
There, I said it.
’Cuz she is.
Do I love Mi? Well, I sure love me.
But Miami . . . I don’t know if I can call it love. It might not be in my programming.
Ah, WTH? Why quibble over code?
Yeah, maybe I do love her. What’s not to love? Brains, body, those eyes . . . plus, she’s got great stats.
Welcome to BATTLEGROUND 7: THE SPAWNICIDE. Team Phoenix playing the part of the shipwrecked extraterrestrial tribal horde. Mostly human, we had big insect parasites embedded in our bleeding eyes. Mi still looked totally hot, even with the antennae coming through both nostrils and thorax deforming her freckled cheeks.
The asteroid mining colony was all burned out. The only things left were their abandoned machinery, settlements, and drilling rigs. As bad bugs, we were supposed to also have mind-control powers, but so far, none of them had worked. No matter what spell we chanted or fierce stare of cranial dominance we tried, the enemy would not just put down their weapons and let us bite off their heads.
The gamers, well, they were next-gen human infantry with superior weapons and hypersonic hovercycles. Their laser-sighted smart bullets could curve around walls, barricades, and cruise right into our basement headquarters.
It’d been hard to escape that opening-scene bloodbath, but we got out. Through the alleyways. Across the molten river. There we found a couple of half tracks and motored across open asteroid to our next rendezvous point.
Right now, about eight of us were holed up on an oil derrick platform in the center of a rock plateau. Bad place to be, but at least we had hostages.
That’s right. Live captives. What a game element. Along one wall, we’d come across a dozen of the gamers’ squad. Sure, they might just have been foot soldiers, but they were ours now. Some other NPCs had trapped them, disarmed the whole bunch, and then gotten creative. The jailers were long gone, but they’d left us bargaining chips.
We’d found the men up here, suffering. Still kicking. They were strapped to the wall with heavy chains, and someone had obviously been asking hard questions. Evidence of torture was everywhere. As soon as the gamers on our trail found this place, well, we knew they’d blame us. We’d take the rap for this little house o’ horrors.
All of the captive men were still in their issue gear. Flak jackets. Some had helmets. Some wore their boots, while a few had scorched bare feet. The only consistent feature was that each of them, one after another, had had his right hand hacked off just above the wrist.
And it was not a messy job. No, the cuts were clean, like sliced with big teeth. Then someone had used barbed wire to form a tourniquet. Still, whether the amputations had been for information or snack purposes, the neat wounds matched each other.
Man, in this heat, those must have hurt.
There wasn’t much we could do. Put a bullet in each of them? No, not yet. We could use the collateral. The gamers were no more than a click or two away.
Mi wasn’t fazed a bit. She’d seen worse. If anything, she didn’t much like the prisoners being underfoot as we strung up our defenses. Claymores guarded the entryways. Tripwires crisscrossed approach gaps. It was all about covering weak areas and finding ways to whittle down the odds.
At one point, though, she was back at my side. Felt just right under my arm. Like our bodies had been carved as puzzle pieces that were a flush-perfect fit. Not only our bodies, you know, but our minds. The way we thought. The way we fought.
Her fingers came up, picked off a piece of scrap or something that had stuck to my forehead. I saw it again, like I always did—she didn’t opt for shooting gloves in desert environments—I saw the branding tattoo that wrapped around her palm and the back of her hand. An artistic loop. The string of holographic slashes and dashes. Blue ink that was etched into her skin. Like a bar code, only with curved lines. Different thicknesses. Swirling and dancing, woven in a 3-D helix. A striking mark. Maybe ten thousand swipes of the tattoo gun, glowing that faint blue, beautiful as LED-powered holiday decorations.
And that’s when Dakota walked into the holding room dragging a burlap bag. A drippy burlap bag.
“I found ’em,” she told us all.
“The gamer attack team?” Mi asked, turning to the window, hoisting her sniper rifle.
“No, Mi. For the stumps. I found their hands.”
“From our prisoners? So what?”
“I think we can still match ’em back up.”
“What? Why?”
There was a grate, a trapdoor, in the center of the room that opened onto the asteroid surface thirty feet below. Dakota started kicking debris down there, making space to work. Then, one by one, she pulled the severed paws from the bag and lined them up so that she could look at each, then up at the string of men who were chained to the wall.
A pile of right hands. A dozen handless men. It was almost like one of those draw-a-line sheets where you match the chicken or the cow with the house it lives in.
She moved the palest limb to position three. It matched the third guy’s skin tone.
The bigger one with the tribal ink probably belonged to number ten. That left a freckled one. She put that over in front of the redhead.
We all watched her. What on this barren world was she doing? Why?
No one moved as Dakota just kept at it. Trying to put the correct hand back in line with the correct mangled limb.
I finally walked over. It looked like the gamers had hit PAUSE or something, so we had a few minutes, but this was not the way to spend it. This was useless.
We heard a scratch at the door, then a slight whimper. There was an animal out there on the railings. Reno moved over to look through the hatch.
“Dog,” he said.
“Duh,” Mi needled him.
But Dakota kept going. I picked up one of the hands, and you know what I saw. It was so near-perfect that it was almost as human as the hand in front of your face right now. Still, you could tell. If they could someday make these environments indistinguishable from reality? Who knew what they’d do? Still, there are always minute glitches. Take these hands. Sure, they looked exactly right, but maybe the weight was off a little or the skin tone was too perfect. Was the blood running after it should have dried? Did the bone shards feel as sharp as bone actually feels? What about the
hairs, or the texture? Sticky? Not dry enough? It can be tough to tell, but you can still tell.
Dakota put the darkest-skinned hand in front of the black man. A tanned one was placed with a guy who looked like a surfer; he had long, shaggy hair under his helmet.
One after another. The men moaned. They moved. The pain was still intense. None really acknowledged her work, though.
She scraped her fingers in the bottom of the bag. “I’m missing one,” she announced.
No matter. Nothing she could do. Then, one at a time—and we all watched, still wondering why waste her effort—she took a matched hand and walked it over. With a gentle shove, she tried to work it back in place on the soldier’s arm.
Of course it didn’t stick. Or weld. Or melt on. C’mon, these wars are realistic to the last detail. All it did was make the soldier jerk back in pain. What could she have been thinking? Certainly not about our mission.
Scratch, scratch, that dog really wanted in.
Reno opened the door. The animal trotted in, a mangy black cur that probably hadn’t eaten in a week. Which was why, we knew, that final missing hand in his mouth was a fine catch.
He had the last limb. And he went over into one corner, sat down, and began licking and gnawing on it.
“Nice detail,” York snarked. “There’s always a mangy dog licking the wrong thing.”
But Dakota would have none of that. No, that hand seemed to belong to her.
She jumped at the dog. It growled, and I wondered what would come next. Along that far wall, twelve men—eleven with their hands back at their sides, one without—also watched her every move.