Grayman Book One: Acts of War

by Michael Rizzo

5

  Grayman:

  “Reality” shifts again.

  You’re getting used to their patterns, despite the drugs they keep feeding you (they’ve underestimated your natural ability to develop tolerance). The worst is the not waking between simulations, like being trapped in dreams. Dreams made of VR games.

  It’s easy to tell it isn’t real. Even the most detailed renderings are still CGI, which glows unnaturally and still—even at max-rez—lacks a sense of “weight”. And there are times when you can almost feel your body in the VR web, especially when it cuts off your circulation so that parts of you don’t want to work right until the software adjusts you.

  They’ve been badgering you repeatedly about where you’ve been and what you’ve done, though from the simulations they keep making you relive it appears they already have all their answers. They seem to be looking to trip you up, break you, find your limits. Stupid game (and that makes it all the easier to just wait it out).

  But you have agreed to play, so you play.

  When they get bored with your atrocities (at least for awhile), they show you what other humans are capable of: Terrorist attacks, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, the acts of petty warlords and so-called “freedom fighters”. Dead families. Dead children. All painstakingly rendered. They make you wander through re-creations of the horror that men do (often men who believe that they are doing God’s work), and they ask you “How do you feel?”

  (The answer you don’t give them: It makes you feel significantly better about the murder you have done. It makes you feel like you have a lot more of it to do.)

  And then they regularly “reward” you by giving you access to their new training programs, showing you what it will take to be soldier in their new army. They let you move through the VR tutorials at your own pace, and they seem to be impressed with how fast you absorb: their weapons, their tactics, their ritual discipline. It’s like you were born to do this, like it’s all already hardwired.

  Then they insert you into very realistic recreations of their best and worst battles, letting you live their history, share their victories and traumas. It’s almost like a bonding of sorts: they dig through your battles, then let you live theirs. Show me yours, I’ll show you mine…

  What they don’t do is let you out.

  Still, you have, over time (and you have no idea how much time, because there is no consistent sense of it here, not even in terms of day and night), gotten used to the pattern and rhythm of their questions, slid into an easy flow of dramatic dialogue with your unseen interrogators, playing with them as much as they try to play with you. This appears to annoy them, but they keep at it, throwing flashes of what you’ve done up in your face in all the forensic detail, breaking it down, hammering with their dull repetitive queries, then letting you slide without warning into some other CGI special effect.

  This one isn’t one of your memories. It must be one of theirs.

  “What is this?”

  You are in a jungle. They’ve even made it hot and tropical.

  “Columbia,” one of the usual voices says dully.

  Your virtual “body” is wearing appropriate camo ACUs, but they have not supplied you with any weapons—either you won’t need any or they expect you to do without, use the enemy’s.

  “So?” you ask when nothing happens but the scenery.

  “Look around.”

  Dead bodies. An assortment of unkempt irregulars. All shot to pieces in the undergrowth. Tactical graphics highlight them so you can’t miss them.

  But then they’re not dead anymore. You’ve gotten used to this part: when the VR shifts from a photorealistic 3D made from actual video or stills of a real event to an animated reconstruction of action that was not caught on any video. One moment the bodies are real and dead, then, in a flash, they’re alive as high-rez computer animation, shooting and getting shot. Mostly getting shot.

  But nobody seems to see you, no one shoots at you, so you must just be here to watch.

  It’s fast. Someone—no more than a shadow moving in the green—sprays in short, disciplined bursts. The few that manage to return fire get cut down before they even know where their enemy is: the shadow seems to pop here and there, and they are all dead in a matter of seconds.

  The shadow. There is just the one, only one unseen attacker.

  You see that now because the shooter is flattened against the wall of a ramshackle hut: animated figure in jungle fatigues with an M-4A, tossing something into the hut that gives a bright flash and a loud, sharp bang but does not seem to do much damage. Stun grenade.

  Your POV follows the shooter into hut. You still can’t see his face. He cleanly drops one of the two fighters inside. The other moves slower, and gets his legs cut out from under him before he can reach his weapon. The shooter’s boots kick him over face-up. It’s an old man. Withered. Toothless. Too angry to beg for his life. He gets kicked in the ribs again for his attitude. Then he gets kicked in the face.

  The shooter leaves him for a moment to go rifling through a stack of hardcopy photos on a little camp table. The VR makes sure you see what they are: pictures of a young, slight, dark-haired girl being raped by men that look very much like the ones dead outside.

  “How do you feel?” your dull narrator cuts in. You don’t answer.

  You can feel the warmth and sickening numbness as they drip more of their drugs into you. It makes the VR shift and swim, but they keep the photos where you can see them. They get shuffled into a rough filmstrip as the girl is raped and abused, then hung upside-down by a frame here in the hut that you are virtually standing in, and the old man takes a hunting knife to her and begins to slice off her skin while she’s still alive.

  Apparently not satisfied with your response, they animate it for you, show you the atrocity happening, the girl convulsing as she is cut. They even simulate the smells: sweat and blood and piss and stale semen. Her screams penetrate your entire body, but they won’t let you move, won’t let you do anything. Except watch.

  “How do you feel?”

  They take the girl out of the sim, take you back to the moment with the shooter and the toothless old man who so enjoyed his work. The knife he used is now back on the camp table with his photo souvenirs. It’s been cleaned, but you recognize it. The shadow-shooter’s anonymous hand picks it up.

  “What do you want to do?”

  You don’t answer. You don’t.

  Then the shooter suddenly turns to face you. You think for a moment that the VR is trying to simulate you—the way you look in the depth of your cold hungry rage—because the eyes look sunken and predator-cold burning but the face under the smears of greasepaint and spatters of blood isn’t right isn’t yours…

  But you know the face.

  “So what do I call you? Commissioner Gordon?”

  Matthew?

  But then they rip it away from you in a swirl of sim nightmare.