by Gard Skinner
As Boss of the dungeon, I had a long string of attack vampires on chains, and I placed these in the outer chambers. That made it quite a sneak mission for gamers to get around them and still stay out of range of their tethers.
I turned a bunch of gamers into werewolves with titanium skulls and spines and, using a catapult, launched them into a three-dimensional skirmish with those who’d survived the first levels. Toss in a few gladiator-style arena fights and that whittled things down to my favor.
But even then, a pack of gamers worked their way through—serious ninja skills—and soon enough, they were surrounding me, stomping my horned feet. Shooting flaming arrows into my pressure points. Eventually, two of them survived, climbed onto my back, and got revenge by extracting my spinal column in a closing scene filled with more bloody pulp and amniotic goo than should have been allowed under any rating system.
Nicely played. But again, I don’t like boss battles. The big cheese always seems to have certain weak points that are just too easy to identify. It’s the journey to the boss that’s more fun. Not the final scene.
When I came out of Re-Sim, it started again. That burning over my right eye. It spread to the bridge of my nose and made streams of tears pour from my left eye. It almost knocked me to the ground.
And on came a vision.
I saw water. I saw people in the water, thrashing around.
And even though it was just a vision, my whole body shivered. The water . . . I could feel it on my skin. It was so cold. A pool? No, maybe a lake. And those people? What were they doing?
No, it couldn’t be.
No.
Not like Dakota’s memory scraps.
Not a swim lesson. No.
Level 12
It’d been at least a week, and the serious gaming rush began to die down. Dakota, thankfully, was in a cheery mood. I’d been worried about her. I liked her. She was cool to have around and a good fighter when she put her mind to it. Now it seemed that after some time for the bad news to sink in, her place in our little gaming-verse had settled in her gut. Good thing. It’s hard to fight well, to live well, to enjoy the little stuff, if you’re getting eaten up about something big like that.
And yeah, it is a big deal. What we are. Our actual worth to the world. Coming to grips with our limits.
Did the rest of us know, or realize, we weren’t really “human”?
Sure we did. We just didn’t have to talk about it all the time. Too depressing. Just like out there in the mortal world, I’m sure people don’t spend a whole lot of time dwelling on the fact they’re getting closer and closer to lights-out every second of every day. Or that they might get eaten by a shark or hit by lightning or die from some other random act. They don’t run around telling everyone about every ailment or doctor’s visit. Why focus on bummer news like that? It’s no way to live.
And live we did and still do. We are alive. As alive as you or your kind.
What are humans, really? I looked it up in a BlackStar tutorial on how to kill you. You’re a biological case with a brain that processes electrical impulses. Those impulses make memories. Those impulses control your actions.
So how are we any different, really? We’re the same electrical impulses, we have the same control over our actions, only our cases are not skin and bone and hair. Our cases are plastic and metal and copper circuitry that, if taken care of, can last centuries. We can swap hardware, improve our processors, and learn from tactical errors.
Humans, well, you’re stuck with your physical limitations. Forever. I guess you can get breast implants and nose jobs, but hey, I’ll take the upgrades we get any day of the week.
But now it was time to relax. We all looked forward to it. No costumes, no guns, no aggression at all. Just good friends and funny stories and a lot of shared laughter.
“I totally ran into wackjob trouble today,” Reno was telling the crew. “The gamers sent in some kind of four-legged magnetic land mine. Going ‘woof, woof!’ It followed me around, lurking behind like some kind of needy dog but never getting close enough to go off.”
“Whoa, what did you do?”
“I could hear them chuckling,” he continued. “I think they were waiting for me to lead it back to my base and my men and then set it off remotely. Stupid friendly pooch. Cute, too.”
“Some new weapons out there lately.” York yawned.
“No kiddin’. I finally found a place I could change into a regular jumpsuit. No metal. Broke the magnetic lock it had on me. Then I got a nice big iron bone. Looked just like a doggie snack. Walked out into the open, said ‘Here, boy! Here, boy! Now FETCH!’”
“Cool!”
“I threw the bone right into the middle of the gamer squad, and as soon as the dog-mine got to it, Mi blew Fido up with a beautiful rifle shot at like nine hundred yards!”
“Awesome!”
“Got ’em good!” Reno boasted. “All of them, right back to the checkpoint. Nothing left but dust.”
I loved it. Now, that was a move I’m sure none of the gamers expected. And therefore, they got their money’s worth. BlackStar would be thrilled with that. Great tactics make great games. We just kept raising the bar.
Team Phoenix—nothing and no one like it anywhere in your world. Or in mine.
And that’s the way it went for a while. Drink a few BlackStar colas, throw down some BlackStar-brand nacho chips.
Yeah, having that little BlackStar stamped on everything everywhere was pretty annoying, but what could you do? It wasn’t like we had to pay for anything.
And this downtime was good. We got to share stories. We traded ideas. I know why they give us time off. You do too. So we can evolve as artificial intelligence. So we can learn from each other’s mistakes and triumphs. It’s brilliant code. It’s self-perpetuating product improvement. BlackStar_1 was no fool.
Something was different, though. It took me a while to notice. Something was wrong with my arm. I shook my hand. Seemed OK, just . . . lighter or something.
I rubbed the shoulder. Muscles all in place. Bones feeling tough. Did maybe the Re-Sim shortcut something and not fully reconstitute my elbow? Nah. I was just being paranoid.
Any pain in my eye? No.
No one trying to teach me to swim? No.
Leftover road signs from SLAUGHTER RACE? Not a one. My vision was fine.
Still, what was wrong?
I looked around. York and Reno had a group of younger NPCs listening to some drawn-out, epic saga of how they beat the gamers ten missions in a row, blah blah blah . . .
Other grunts from Rio and Deke’s team were coming and going. Assignments clocked in on the screen, NPCs rolled out. Sometimes a platoon returned quickly; other times they got pulled into longer sessions. You could never tell going in. Like any military unit, your group just moved together.
But still, my arm, it felt kind of light.
Mi and Dakota were across the room, chatting, smiling, shooting the breeze. Nothing strange about that.
But yes, actually, there was.
Mi wasn’t here with me. By my side. Instead, she’d gone over to sit with Dakota. Now, what would strike me as odd about that?
Well, it explained my arm, why it felt incomplete. When you get used to someone clinging to it night and day, then they leave, you’ve got less weight to carry around, don’t you?
But why be over there? What was up with the private conversation?
I wandered across, and wouldn’t you know, as soon as I got to their table, they stopped chatting. Both looked up, smiling like they were totally happy to see me.
Mi even returned to her place on my sleeve.
Dakota grabbed another cola. The moment had passed.
It was probably nothing. And it was definitely a good thing they were becoming better friends. The more they worked together, the better my team scores would get.
Level 13
I should have seen it coming, right? After all, I am Phoenix. Of the Team Phoenix. It’s my job to
spot that kind of devious, backstabbing mutiny.
The mission hit the board. Reno ran the profile for the rest of us. He told the team we were gearing up for a trip into DOOM SPACE.
That title’s great, but it’s about as dark as it gets. A burned-out mining vessel traversing a barren galaxy, and with all this technology and all that weaponry they still can’t equip a single room with a sufficient number of light bulbs? Close your eyes real quick. It’s easier to see through your lids than it is on most of those ships’ decks.
Still, we were the creepies, the Acromorphs, so we had a rudimentary form of night vision. We could hide in the shadows, and there were plenty of shadows.
We suited up, just the five of us, tentacles and fangs and those black, soulless eyes. I led everyone to the portal, shoved my hand in the slot, sucked in a deep breath, squinted to get ready for the darkness, and made the quick jump from our mission center to . . .
Bright, bright light?
What the . . . ? This wasn’t right. A midday sun was burning through my costume.
It was roasting hot out here, and with the glare, I really couldn’t see anything through the eye slits.
Something was wrong. I could feel it instantly. This was no ship. This was not deep space. More like shallow hell.
And it was boiling inside all that foam rubber.
We’d been dropped in the wrong spot. And that never happened. This was not the outer rim of a distant galaxy. It looked more like Death Valley. Add to that, my right eye was pinging with pain. I wanted to find an ice pick to stab in there, maybe make it stop . . .
I shucked off the costume, only to see that the rest of my team had done the same. Where were we? In the middle of a stretch of wasteland. Brush was about the only thing out here, not even a scorpion or snake or circling buzzard as far as our eyes could see.
“Damn!” I yelled. No echo. There was nothing there to bounce sound back. It looked like an unfinished landscape. Like a designer had planned to have a desert level but had abandoned it before finishing the mountains or the town or the enemies or anything other than sand, scrub, and heat.
“Bingo!” Dakota howled triumphantly. She looked anything but shocked. Instead, she seemed pleased as punch.
“Where are we?” I asked her directly. Then I spun on Reno. “You ran the profile. You said we were headed for DOOM SPACE!”
“I lied,” he said bluntly—disrespectfully, in fact. I’d never heard that tone from anyone in my command. Couldn’t remember the last time in my life someone had the nerve to speak to me like that.
“Which way?” Mi asked Dakota. It seemed like she was in charge now.
The blond girl, her eyes locked on me, just pointed north.
But there was nothing north. Not a speck as far as the eye could see.
She started walking, and wouldn’t you know, York, Reno, and Mi fell in step behind her. Not one of them even looked in my direction for permission to deploy.
Something was up. A lot had been going on.
I watched them, my team, my friends, the people I spent night and day with. Who I fought with. Who I loved and looked after like my own kids.
They got farther and farther away, until they became four gray dots in the distance. I looked down, realizing I hadn’t even moved from the spot where I’d dropped my Acromorph suit. It lay there in the sand, moving slightly in the breeze. At least the programmers had had time to insert a breeze. Without it, the temps would easily have been over 140 F-ing-heit.
And that was when I noticed them. In the hardscrabble dirt. By my discarded suit. The pair of tracks. Giant tire tracks.
The wind had almost erased the outline, but still, regular indentations were unmistakable.
Something big had rolled over this spot before.
Something like a giant buggy.
A giant buggy towing a trailer.
Freakin’ Dakota. Didn’t she realize what she was messing with here? I trudged along, miles behind, as the pieces started to fall into place.
She never had accepted or bought into being an NPC, had she? Or maybe she had but hoped to become more. One way or another, the girl just wasn’t content with her fate or her place.
As the hours stacked up, I began to shift my anger. Mostly toward my good buddy Reno, who had tricked me into coming here. I guess he had to. The team wouldn’t have been able to deploy without me, so they needed my hand to enter the game-world portal.
Still, there were questions. How had they been able to manipulate things so we’d come here instead of going wherever the mission profile had determined? We didn’t decide destinations. They just appeared on the board when a gamer opened the environment.
Only Dakota had the answers. Eventually, though—whether you’re a man or a woman or a fish or a monkey or a combat soldier created by programmers to fight and die—it’s time to just get on the ride and see it through. That’s life. Play the cards you’ve been dealt. You can’t play what you don’t hold.
She had to know this place was a dead end now. This whole thing—the gaming session and the rest of it—had been a systems test. BlackStar had wanted to find out what was behind Dakota’s sketchy behavior. And then they’d nearly erased her forever.
Now, lately, as I told you, that sketchy behavior had been gone. She’d fought well. Maybe better than any of us over the past few weeks.
She should have let it rest. Ridden the ride. Enjoyed the perks. Made sure they didn’t delete her ungrateful butt.
There was no good reason for this, for going off-grid.
The miles were still ticking away. Step after step. Why weren’t we getting pulled back to base? We had to end this sidetrack. Get back to the real games. They didn’t just let the best of the best wander in a desert for days on end. We’d be missed. And we’d pay for it.
I’m fast on the march, but not much faster than anyone else. I was the same generation as everyone except Dakota, so technically, she might have been the strongest, but she had to stick with the team. Whenever you move in a group, no matter how efficiently, you slow a bit. This was the edge I needed.
Twelve hours later I’d caught them. The tire tracks still stretched parallel as far as the eye could see, but now I was coming up on their tail.
They knew I was back but didn’t break stride. None of them were even questioning Dakota about what they were doing out here. It was like they were on a mission. Walking. Sweating. Struggling. But trudging on and on. Lips cracked. No water. Skin burned. Together to the end. Their boot prints stretched behind us for fifty miles, weaving here and there, but in four nearly parallel sets. It was a miracle the natural desert predators—if there were any—hadn’t started picking up our scent.
Whatever hold Dakota had on my team, whatever she’d said or promised, it was enough that it completely eliminated any kind of backtalk. Why couldn’t I get that kind of obedience?
I fell into step. No sense arguing right off. Plus, eventually, the system would notice we weren’t at our base or engaged in a game and pull us back in. It was just a matter of time.
They were drenched in sweat. The heat was intense; the sun hadn’t moved an inch. Most games have natural day and night cycles now, but not this one. It was stuck. Probably because it was unused. An eternal cooker. High noon, always high noon.
The thing that nagged at me, though, was still the first thing: Why come back? This was not a commercial game.
“Where do you think we’re going?” I finally barked up to Dakota.
She didn’t even break stride. Determination was a string of code she did not lack.
She yelled back, “To the lab. I have questions. We have questions.”
“You already know the answers, Dakota! You’re a program. An advanced piece of artificial intelligence designed to kick butt first and take names never! They wrote you. Just like they make their desktop blue or their default font Tahoma!”
“Complete bull!” she snapped in return. “There are way too many unanswered questions!”
I actually rolled my eyes. Nobody ever has all the answers to everything. That’s the very foundation of “life.”
“You’re just going to end up with more questions!” I warned.
“Maybe. So then I’ll ask those.”
“Which won’t clear anything up, it’ll just lead to—”
“I know, I know, more questions. No need to beat it into the ground, Phoenix. Keep walking.”
“And why didn’t you tell me you were planning this little outing? I thought we were a team.”
“You’d never have approved it.” She laughed back. “Would you?”
“No, never.” At least I was honest.
“So there. We had to act.”
“All of you?”
“Of course all of us,” Mi blurted out. “She’s right, Phoenix. I mean, I dig you and all, but you should listen to Dakota. She makes a lot of sense about stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Like stuff about—”
But Mi was cut short when Dakota announced loudly, “We’re here!”
Here? I glanced around. Same desert. Nothing had changed. Sun overhead. Very hot. Even the scrub brush, or the versions of it, was just continuing to duplicate like in one of those kids’ shows where the monster runs and runs and the same background furniture scrolls over and over again.
York and Reno were also scanning the area. They appeared equally unconvinced.
“Here? Where?” I mocked. “This is the same!”
“Hardly.” Dakota smiled. She looked like she’d just conquered a mountain even though she hadn’t climbed a single foot in elevation since the long walk began.
Her finger was pointing down.
Sure, the landscape was the same as when we’d started out so many hours ago. But this was the spot. Or a spot.
The tire tracks simply ended. For miles they’d led us here, to this place, and now they’d vanished, as if sucked underneath the boiling desert sand.