Game Slaves (10 page)

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
every
thing. 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.

Dakota looked around for at least a minute. The horizon was the same. The brush was unchanged. The wind was a constant, so steady it felt like a fan. It probably was a fan.

So she reached out, stretching her arm forward, and the tips of her fingers hit something hard. It was invisible. A boundary. An edge of this place. The gate or door to the next.

Now they were all up there, fumbling, feeling the transparent wall like they were mimes in a box as large as the world itself. York was moving left, Reno to the right, Mi and Dakota rubbing and exploring top to bottom.

“Here,” Dakota said, her fingers wrapped around something about knee-high. Still, it was completely invisible, and from where I stood, I thought she might be pretending to have found the latch.

She turned it, then pulled up. I had a vision spike of a typical suburban dad hoisting his garage door so he could get to his lawn mower. Now, there's a memory that had no place in my head . . . Oh, wait, how men are men on the outside: mowing grass. Was
that
where we were headed? My spine shuddered with pure fear, and I don't get scared too often.

As Dakota pulled, a wide section of the desert landscape slid up and rolled into a cylinder. It was a door. A wide berth for the crawler to drive through. Inside, I saw a tunnel stretch down, a ramp leading exactly where Dakota hoped we'd be able to go.

It was the road to the test center. Where we'd first faced the BlackStar team. Where they'd cornered the two of us, trying to find out what was wrong with their programming.

All five of us stepped through, the heat immediately disappearing. Now it was icy cold, our breath forming a cloud around our position. The sun was gone. Five paces in, the door rolled shut, locking.

I hate to make a comparison to games all the time, but it was just like when you step through a door and you know danger is lurking just ahead but that hatch behind you was one-way.

As we shuffled along, none of us had to point out that it was getting much darker the deeper we went. After a while the only thing we could see was our breath, a wisp of white that would quickly evaporate in the frigid black.

Footsteps and heavy, heavy breathing. My hands were out in front so I wouldn't bump a wall. Couldn't see them, either, not even the glow of our tattoos.

I was sure the rest of the team were shuffling in the same pose. Down and down. That's how we found our way. We knew the only way to go was to follow our feet into the basement of this empty level.

 

How far did we descend? Who knew. And it wasn't like this world was any more real than our own home base. It seemed like we were going down, but maybe we were going up. In all likelihood we weren't really going anywhere at all. We were just tiny bits of energy mashing around on some digital grid. Little more than x-y-z coordinates plotted by a motherboard in some computer server in some air-conditioned data center in Dallas or Denver or who-really-cares-where.

“What do you think the penalty is for trespassing?” York suddenly asked. “Would they program us into a prison cell for a few years?”

“Or,” Reno suggested, “maybe they'd do some kind of system restore where we never actually trespassed.”

“They can't do that,” Dakota answered in the dark. “They can't take back the past or change it. What's done is done.”

“On the contrary,” York countered, “they take players backward in time
all
the time in games. That's what a gamer checkpoint is. A saved file. They save in that place, then the dude plays on, and if he fails and we win, they just reload him to the last save point.”

“But you're forgetting that you're
not
a computer program,” Dakota spat at him, her breath hot and white in the blackness. “You and I talked about that for a long time, York. Your experience is cumulative. One day's memories add to the next.”

“I know, I know,” he replied. I was having a fun time listening. I was learning a lot about what crap Dakota had been feeding my team.

“But,” he continued, “your ideas, Dakota, they didn't answer all the questions either.”

“I didn't say I had
all
the answers. I'm just saying that accepting you're just a computer program created by a video game designer—well, it doesn't add up.”

“Doesn't add up
how?
” I interrupted. I had to hear that theory. I really wanted to know what she'd pitched my team that'd convinced them to disobey me and go off on this little junket into forbidden basements.

Dakota had reached another wall. She bumped it hard and I heard her mumble, “Ouch.” That made me smile a bit through the gloom.

This time her search was easy, and I heard a door handle click.

“Phoenix, I think you already know. I think you've probably figured it out on your own. You're too smart to have missed so many clues.”

Man, is it annoying when someone tells you that you already know something you don't already know. I just can't stand it when people give me credit for being more intelligent than I actually am. Grant me a little ignorance, please. My programming is simple: fight, win, destroy, triumph. What more does a modern antihero need?

She went on, “You don't need me to tell you what's been churning around in your head. Just listen to your own common sense, Phoenix. Take inventory of what you've
really
got in here. Then it'll all become clear.”

What was that? A riddle? I don't do riddles. I do destruction and mayhem and Rating Board–approved high-definition digital violence! That's my purpose, my core mission parameters. It's my code.

Take
inventory?
I didn't have a single weapon. None of us did. Inventory = helpless.

The door popped open. Light streamed in. And that's when we saw it.

It was hideous!

It was monstrous!

It was the most shocking, revolting, gnarly-gross surprise in the history of video games!

And sure, she was cute. OK, she was adorable. All right, she was a darling little girl with blond hair and pigtails and a nice blue summer dress and an irresistible teddy bear tucked under her arm.

She was all those things. And probably the most horrible enemy we could have ever encountered.

With NPC monsters or gamers, at least they're predictable.

This, however, was going to be
big
trouble.

Ever tried to reason with a five-year-old kid? Ever tried to get straight answers from a child?

Good luck.

The adorable waif shifted her weight from one tiny ballerina slipper to the other.