by D. J. Bodden
“We need to push him,” Bullard continued. “The second I walked through that door, I had two options. I could pull him out of the game and likely have to fire both of you, or we could come up with something good enough for the Board to forget they told us not to do it.”
“And we don’t have that yet?”
“You need to play more video games, Professor. We have some fascinating data on man-machine interfaces. Seriously, that stuff where he dreamed about his grandfather? That’s going to knock the faculty back at Penn on their asses, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Ms. Bullard, it is,” Jeff said, flattered and a bit creeped out she knew so much about him.
“But it won’t do anything for a gamer. Pull up some AAA game trailers on YouTube. We need emotional. We need epic. Alan needs to come out of this a hero, for all our sakes.”
Bullard stood and stretched. “Is there any coffee left in this building?”
“Nope.”
“Damn. Maybe I’ll send one of the security guys on an errand.” She grinned. “I’m going to go text Osmark the all clear. You need anything?”
“Coffee and donuts?”
“You want Dunkin’ or Krispy Kreme?”
“Dunkin’ for the coffee, Krispy Kreme for the donuts,” Jeff said, pushing his luck.
“Done,” Bullard said, smiling. Maybe she wasn’t so bad.
When she was gone, he sat down in the second chair he’d brought over, leaving his nicer headset and chair where they were. After all, she’d already changed the settings on the arm and back rests the way she wanted them. He rolled his eyes. I’m such a pushover.
He took himself off mute. “Hey, Alan?”
“Yeah, Jeff?” Alan answered, huffing.
“Do you remember something weird around the time those two thugs were chasing you?”
“Weird how?”
“I don’t know,” Jeff answered. “It was around the time he was throwing daggers at you.”
Alan didn’t answer for a few seconds, then said, “Was it during the slow-mo?”
“The what?”
“The slow motion.”
“There wasn’t any slow motion.”
“Sure there was,” Alan answered, sounding annoyed. “Time slowed for five seconds. It’s part of my Keen-Sight skill. Check the tape.”
Jeff opened his mouth to tell Alan that was impossible because the game clock was synched to the real world. Then he closed it. Holy effing shit balls, he thought.
He looked back at Alan’s brain activity. It had gapped again, just like before.
They’d given Kronos a paradox to solve—keep the clock synched to the real world, and slow time for five seconds. The AI couldn’t do that, so it had sped Alan up. For five seconds, Alan had used the server farm as his brain.
Jeff allowed himself a private smile of utter superiority over Alan, Bullard, the DoD, and the faculty at all the institutions he’d studied or lectured at. Dreaming in VR was a marketing gimmick, good for some pop-science fame, and while V.G.O. was a nerd’s wet dream, he’d taken the job for the money.
This was beyond that. It made his brain spark and his mouth water. Jeff Berkowitz had found a way to give a human being the processing power of a supercomputer. It was going to change everything.
EIGHTEEN
IF I DIDN’T TAKE OFF at full speed, the prefect would follow through on his threat. If I used up too much of my Stamina, I’d die. I didn’t know what dying would be like in the game, but if getting injured was any indication, it wouldn’t be pleasant.
So I ran. I drained my Stamina to zero and pushed through it. It turned out the game would let me do that; it just put me through an exponentially increasing amount of pain, until it felt like my shins would snap and my knees would bend the wrong way and I had to slow down. But I didn’t stop. I let my Stamina get back to zero, and then I pushed again.
This was just another puzzle to solve. It was a new set of rules. I’d heard the tone in Sandra’s voice, and I knew she was a veteran. The fate of the world, and of my love life, hangs in the balance.
When Jeff came back to ask his question about the slow-mo, I was in a weird kind of altered state where I’d separated myself from my body. It was like I was driving a car. The rhythm of my feet striking the gravel was the speedometer, and pain was the tach. I redlined the engine like I was driving a stolen getaway car, and everything worked fine on that basis. I answered Jeff’s questions without taking my eye off the road.
About halfway around the camp, when no legionaries ran up to knock me over, I thought about slowing down, but I saw the prefect’s dead-eyed stare in my head and kept running. I passed the patrol again, but this time they were silent.
I made it back to the training ground, my whole world the breathless management of parameters, sweat making my arms and legs glide, underwear chafing, and the prefect raised two fingers, then pointed down the road.
A prompt popped up, and I laughed.
<<<>>>
Log out: Yes/No?
<<<>>>
In the real world, I would have quit. I would have told Osmark to keep running without me and found a softer woman to court. I would have told everyone to piss off. If I’d been in danger, I would have handed over my wallet and my phone, and maybe taken a beating, but this would have been too much.
But it wasn’t real. None of it was real. I had a HUD and a Stamina bar. Status effects fixed themselves after a few minutes. It wasn’t even mind over matter, because my matter was comfortably reclined in a hospital bed. “I can do this,” I told myself, and whether it was the Suggestion or something deeper, I believed it. Halfway through my third lap, another prompt popped up.
<<<>>>
Ability: Conditioning
No pain, no gain. After what you’ve been through, the little things seem less important.
Ability Type/Level: Passive/Level 1
Cost: None
Effect: Pain felt due to effort, status effects, or injuries is reduced by 2%.
<<<>>>
Two percent doesn’t seem like much, but makes a difference. I pushed a little harder. One of the soldiers on patrol gave me a nod as I passed.
I came to a stop in front of the prefect and stood with my hands behind my back, like Provus had in front of his father. My body wanted to lie on the grass and just breathe, but I didn’t let it.
“Do you have any questions?”
“No, Prefect,” I answered.
The prefect nodded slightly. “Halius!” he shouted.
A man broke off from his training group and ran over. It was the first man who’d knocked me down, while I was running. “Yes, Prefect?”
The prefect looked at me. “Halius is a second-tour legionary. He’s killed pirates and smugglers on the road to Wyrdtide, and elf supremacists in the forests of the Shining Plains. Disobey him and I’ll send you back to Titus. He will not be pleased. Understood?”
“Yes, Prefect,” I said.
The prefect put his hand on Halius’s shoulder. “He’s a specialist, doesn’t know how to fight. Teach him a proper stance, blocks, counters, throws, and counters to throws. I don’t have time to babysit; I catch either of you slacking, you both run. Understood?”
“Yes, Prefect,” Halius said.
“Get to it.”
“Yes, Prefect,” we both said.
I followed Halius to an open, grassy area. “No hard feelings?” I asked him.
“None,” he answered. “Now get your hands up, and set your feet like mine.”
ATTABOY, ALAN, Sandra thought. She’d hoped he’d figure out what was going on. She could have told him, but the prefect would have sniffed out someone gaming him and punished him harder. “All right,” she told Jeff. “We’re going to be here a while. Is there any problem with Alan staying in there another day or two?”
“Are you asking me as a non-medical doctor? Because I can’t give you a legally binding opinion here.”
“What about a non-legally binding one?”
Jeff
shrugged and crossed his arms, covering up the one with the scars. “Fasting’s good for you. The nanites don’t respond well to dehydration, though. It increases the chance of an aneurysm.”
“You mean the nanite-night-night?”
Jeff raised an eyebrow. “Is that what they’re calling it these days? The parajumpers I worked with called it getting head-bricked.”
“Like bricking a computer?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Smart. I ran in different circles. We called it triple-N or B-Sod.”
“What’s B-Sod stand for? No, wait... blue screen of death?”
Sandra grinned. “I came up with it.” She wasn’t about to tell him the CIA had a way to trigger it on purpose, though. “But point taken, I’ll give him an IV.”
“You know how to do that?”
Sandra winked at him. “I’m a trained combat medic. Where did the nurses store the saline?”
ONCE I’D FIGURED OUT the rules, training with the Legion wasn’t so bad. It was liberating, in a way, because I didn’t have to make any decisions, which didn’t mean I wasn’t using my brain.
Halius would show me how to do something, first demonstrating it on me or on another legionary, then breaking down the physical task into words as well as moving my body into the correct positions. It was all fast rote memorization—we weren’t dancing, he told me, so the movements were about effectiveness not interpretation. If I didn’t learn fast enough, or I got distracted, he assigned me a short physical task like sprinting to the end of the road and back. Then we tried again.
Water came at regular intervals. A servant led a donkey onto the training field with an amphora of water on each side every forty-five minutes or so. Halius and I drank a ladleful each, like everyone else, and then got back to training. After two hours, we broke for lunch.
The noon meal was served in a long mess tent, spicy lentils and fresh baked bread with olive oil and a little honey. We ate quickly without fussing over manners, then cleared our spots for the next legionaries to sit. Halius explained that in the field, legionaries took turns cooking and eating with their squads, although someone might cook more often if they had the skill. A decanus would draw a ration of grain, meat, and vegetables for his squad, and they’d supplement by foraging when supplies got low or just to change things up.
We spent about thirty minutes talking about life in the Legion, the places he’d been, and the people he’d met. Then the prefect returned and everyone got back to work.
By the time the water donkey came by for the first time that afternoon, I’d built a model of what was going on in my head. My tasks were defined from a desired end result to the way I should close my fists. Anything less than perfection was unacceptable, but the corrections came without emotional baggage or judgment. It was part of the process.
If I focused and picked something up faster, Halius would explain subtleties to the movement I wouldn’t have thought of on my own. If I struggled, as long as I put in the effort, he would fix me until I got it right. Once I had it right, we’d go through dozens of repetitions, sometimes on my own, sometimes alternating exercises or taking turns with the counters and throws. Focus, effort, and correct execution earned respect and additional information, which seemed to be the main currency exchange on the training field. The legionaries were hungry for it. Other instructors ran up to Halius or the prefect to check their knowledge before running back to their teams, and legionaries often raised their hands to ask questions. They wanted to know every detail about how to kill and how to survive.
It was just after the third donkey of the afternoon, and I was starting to lag. Halius looked at me with a wry smile and said, “You want to take a lap around the camp before the old man makes us do it?”
“Sure,” I said, surprising myself.
The prefect watched us leave but didn’t comment.
It wasn’t a friendly jog. Halius ran beside me, but he pushed and goaded me to go faster. He was in better shape than me, but he also had to keep up a steady stream of encouragement and abuse as he ran, so we were both sweating by the time we got back to the field.
Two more donkeys and a run later, we finished the afternoon’s training by playing Griffin in the Ring. The game was simple: twenty legionaries got into a circle with one of them in the middle. The people in the ring would take turns attacking the one in the middle using whatever moves they’d learned up to that point. The “griffin” just had to apply the correct counter and make it through the successive attacks without getting knocked down or passing out.
“Do what you can,” Halius said. “It not about winning or losing, it’s about applying what you learned from any angle and against any body type.”
In the process, I leveled up my Unarmed skill to level 3 and Light Armor to level 4. Unarmed gave me a 9% bonus empty handed, but also 4.5% with any weapon because I’d learned how to use my body weight more effectively. Light Armor was all about taking a hit without protection and gave a 14% boost to my Base Armor when I was in robes or normal clothing.
The last man to step into the center of the ring was the prefect himself. We had a full five minutes to try anything we’d learned on him, in any order and from any angle. We came at him alone and in pairs, side by side or from opposite angles, and he tossed us around like we were children. It was the most incredible display of focus and skill I’d ever seen or been the victim of.
“That guy is a badass,” Sandra said, and I agreed.
When the five minutes were up, the prefect dismissed everyone except Halius and me. I caught a glimpse of Provus shaking hands with some of the other legionaries. Apparently, he’d come to take his turn in the ring as well.
Halius nudged me with his elbow, and I focused my attention on the prefect.
“Good,” the prefect said. “Did you learn something?”
“I did, Prefect.” I wasn’t sure if I could handle myself in a fight any better, but I’d seen enough different things that I felt like I might spend less time figuring out what was going on and more time saving my skin. I did wonder if what I’d learned would transfer over to my real body, or if it was just like any other MMO where my awesomeness would stay confined to the screen.
The prefect clasped his hands behind his back. “I’m not sure how much time you’ll be with us before you’re sent on an assignment, but there’s one thing we should probably teach you now in case you ever need it. Halius?”
“Yes, Prefect?”
“Get me a spear.”
“Yes, Prefect.”
I stood there waiting with the prefect as Halius took off at a dead sprint.
“You the one who saved Provus?” the prefect asked, his voice low.
“I helped him save himself, Prefect.”
“Thanks,” he said with surprising informality. “You did the Legion and all of us a favor. Most of the senators and knights would spend my boys and girls like they spend coppers in a whorehouse, then sign away all they gained at the treaty table. Provus came up the right way, with the troops. He’s our only hope if the Griffin dies and this lot has to fight a proper war.”
I swallowed. I was almost glad I hadn’t known that when I took off after Garrett and Mog in the marketplace. The fate of the world really had hung in the balance.
Halius returned with a spear and handed it to the prefect, who snatched it out of his hands.
The prefect looked at me. “If you’re working for Titus, odds are you’re going to piss someone off one day in a place you won’t have any friends. Distance is your best friend in those cases. The area someone has to search increases exponentially the further you get.”
That made sense. Pi times the radius squared—I’d learned that in grade school. What was curious was the notion that I was working for Titus. I didn’t remember signing up, but maybe there had been more to me accepting Gaius’s thanks and reward than I’d realized.
“The enemy will try to overcome that advantage with speed and numbers. Mounts are expensive, so
if you’ve done everything right and gotten the hell out of where you were, you should only have to face down one rider.” He hefted the spear. “The principle is the same whether you’re facing a war-bear or a charger, or even an oversized monster. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a phalanx with other soldiers or alone, or whether you have a steel pike or a quarterstaff. I could sell you a line about glory and protecting the man next to you, but that’s garbage. You’re going to feel this thing coming through the soles of your feet, see it loom over you like a tidal wave, and you’re going to want to run.”
My mouth was dry. I didn’t want to hear about this, let alone ever have to do it.
“And if you run,” the prefect said, “if you or the man next to you waver, you will all die. You need to understand that beyond thought and courage all the way down to your soul, Alan Campbell,” he said, using my full name. “Salvation lies in six feet of oak and metal, and holding your ground.”
Jesus Christ.
The prefect saw his speech hit home and grunted. Then showed me how it was done. It wasn’t complicated. He held the spear near the blunt end, hands about two feet apart, crouched the way Halius had showed me for any kind of fighting, and planted the butt of the spear into the ground.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“That’s it,” he said. “Make a line between your eyes, the spear tip, and your target. Simplest thing in the world.” He looked at Halius, and the two men laughed like he’d told the most hilarious joke in existence.
THE PREFECT DISMISSED us and Halius showed me where the camp baths were. To my surprise, the camp actually had a semipermanent structure for it. Copper pipes heated by wood fires carried water to a twenty-by-ten-foot pool that held four feet of steaming water. It was a sausage party again—soldiers of every rank came to clean off and socialize after a day of training—but it didn’t shock me as much as the first time, and I kind of liked the easy, informal atmosphere. I did keep my eyes off myself and any reflections, if I could manage it, knowing Sandra was riding shotgun behind my eyes.