Game Slaves (6 page)

“What kind of game is this?” she asked with a lot of menace in her voice.

It was exactly the same feeling I was having. Gamers never take prisoners. Why would they? They get no points, no thrill, no “delightful” death graphics like spurting blood or exploding rib cages or careening body parts. Those guys live for rag-doll physics. Not for building a zoo.

There was no point in capturing even one of the enemy.

“I don't know,” I told her honestly. “But this is by far the longest session I've ever been assigned to.”

“You're sure it's a
game?
” she asked softly. The sun had just reached the distant horizon. We had maybe five minutes of light left. And we'd been in here twenty-four hours, easy.

Sure it's a game?
I just shook my head. I really didn't know. I had no clue where we were headed. Or why. From the gamers' perspective, those guys on the motorcycles, why would they ever want to play anything that lasted so many hours and
didn't
end with the thrill of killing a disgusting enemy like us? What was the point?

We rolled across desert. Yard after yard. Mile upon mile. Answers seemed a long way off.

“Did you see their tags?” Dakota asked.

She seemed to be getting a second wind. And her wounds, like mine, were healing up. Limb damage was never permanent for us.

“Their tags?”

“Gamer tags.”

“I know what tags are.” I laughed at her.

“But did you
read
them?”

I thought back. No. I never did anymore. They're always something stupid like God_of_Destruktion or Apocalypse_Cow or Killin_Machine_666 or Im_da_Bomb! Whatever. Most are ridiculous. You go blind to them after a while.

“The rider who captured me was called BlackStar_2.”

I just stared at her. That short a tag? That, well, nonviolent?

I had to clarify. “
BlackStar
_
2?
That's it?”

She nodded.

“Where's the evil mischief? Where's the dastardly, juvenile-stupid name in
that?
”

She shrugged, then added, “The one who had that gun pointed at you was BlackStar_3.”

“You've got to be kidding.”

She shook her head. “The first motorcyclist you shot in half was BlackStar_1.”

Whoa.

Weirder and weirder.

Maybe this wasn't a game after all.

They dumped us in a cell and, well, since you're familiar with video games, you know it could only go two ways.

One kind of cell is like the dirtiest, scummiest, most rodent-ridden pit ever created by graphic artists. Old skeletons, rats eating rib meat, spiders the size of a principal's butt, the works.

The other kind can be even more frightening, as it inevitably leads only to cruel medical experiments performed by insane scientists.

Unfortunately,
the other kind
was where we were stuffed.

The walls were clean, the table immaculate, and the bunks looked as if they'd never been used. Maybe they hadn't. We are, as you remember, the cutting edge of gaming NPCs. This might have been an entirely new environment. Unsoiled and untouched. Maybe something made for a top-secret military training game. Or a test arena for the next generation of combat.

 

What were our captors waiting for? What kind of game has long breaks in the action where you do nothing?

The boring kind, I guess.

Dakota and I got cleaned up. Robots removed all the hillbilly clothing and makeup, and they rinsed us off in four-nozzle showers. Any nonfatal wounds, as usual, were healing quickly. The water was hot and felt great. My thick arms and legs finally relaxed after that marathon on the run. The smell washed down the drain along with about a pound of the barren landscape we'd been tromping across.

Crazy, the water, it was nice and warm. Not freezing. Not boiling. Just perfect.

Then they fed us. Now, this was also strange—consuming food in a video game? Not once in all the years I'd been running the team had we stopped in the middle of a session to eat. Recharge, whether it was a meal or sleep or just some time off, always came
after
the session. Back at Central Ops. After we died or the gamer saved and let us go home. At no point did the actual gaming platform include fried chicken and gravy and big bottles of Coke and a huge mound of mashed potatoes.

It tasted great. Absolutely great.

“We're not in the
HILLS HAVE TEETH
world anymore,” Dakota slurred to me through a mouthful of spuds. “Not a chance. We got pulled or pushed to another environment.”

I didn't agree. The two were linked. Some kind of door or portal. Maybe this was just the next level, but still, the main question,
why
capture us? It wasn't like we knew anything . . .

Or did we?

I didn't know squat.

But Dakota had been grabbed too. And nothing had been the same since that day on LB-427.

 

How long would it take, really, before gaming environments mirrored real-world challenges even more realistically? What if this was the next generation? Instead of the gamer having to decimate every enemy, what if now, in this new arena, the NPC had information you had to extract in order to continue to level up through the game?

Interesting twist. And innovative game tech always sells.

One thing backed that theory up: our gaming worlds
never
sat still. Those designers out there were always trying new things. This might just have been one of those tests. A trial environment. Made some sense. Introduce a torture chamber or an interrogation challenge. Still, what could we possibly
know?
Or have seen? Why imprison us? Why feed us? Why not just get to the information extraction part of the session?

“Think it's a game glitch?” Dakota asked me, stuffing calories in as fast as her hands could shovel.

“It's new to me,” I admitted, then took some time to really look at Dakota. She was still so fresh. We'd had a couple of weeks together. And it was true that over the years my team kind of came and went. Lately, we'd been pretty solid. Mi and I had been partners the longest. York and Reno, eons together. There were a dozen other NPCs in the system whose moves I knew as well as my own; guys like Jevo, or this other one, Deke, who ran his own team now.

But Dakota, she was a wild card.

Sure, teammates moved. It happened. They got burned out, they lost a step, they took too many frag grenades to the chin. Most of the time they'd be assigned to a less stressful team. Maybe driving computer-controlled cars in
GREED FOR SPEED
. Or playing Bowser or Luigi or Clank or Ratchet or Jak or that rat-thing he carries around on his shoulder. There were plenty of jobs out there.

Then, of course, we'd get a replacement.

And that's how we got Dakota. She just appeared one day. She looked the part, like Mi, with blond hair instead of Mi's black. Both were about the same size with the same athletic build. Both could run, jump, fight, shoot, and hold their own day in and day out. Both ate when hungry, went to sleep when tired, and rolled with the punches as well as any other stud on my team.

But Dakota, she was off a bit. I thought back to that first battle. That day she was pinned down, not fighting, and thinking she could
talk
her way out of the carnage?

Didn't work then. Wasn't going to work now.

The door clanked open and four very serious men strode in, clamped huge restraints on our arms, and dragged us out of our cell.

I looked this time. I took notice. They had no overhead tags. This was all programmed; these guys were the same as the robots, sent to manage the NPC leaders.

Still we had no clue why.

I was bolted to an upright board and leaned back at about sixty degrees. Bright lights. Probes on weird machines. An EKG machine or whatever was attached to one arm over my holo-tattoo, beeping away, telling me or them or whoever that I had a pulse, and it was going off like a trip hammer.

I gotta admit, I was pretty scared. These freaks had no intention of letting us go. We were alone. Mi was . . . well, wherever. Not at my side, that's for sure. And I couldn't watch her back, either.

My team was toast. For all I knew, this might be the end of the road. No more CO. No more missions, no more gaming. No more life. Just a blank cell and no idea why I'd lost everything I ever had. A life sentence. But for what crime? Had we lost one too many times?

Dakota was right next to me, and I could hear her machine buzzing away. They say it takes intelligence to feel fear, so on that scale, she was a lot more intelligent than I'll ever be. Her heart rate was off the charts, pinging like a pinball machine.

“Shut off the lights,” a voice from out there, behind the apparatus, told someone.

The lamps died. Now we could see better. A big room. An operating theater. Faces pressed up against glass in the overhead viewing area. Four or five men on the floor with us, checking the readouts, making adjustments, pointing data out to each other.

“No spots?” one of the techs asked.

“Don't you think bright interrogation lights are way overdone?” another guy answered. I got a good look at him: Long hair, tied back. Glasses. Lab coat. He even had a clipboard. How cute.

The man stared at me and I made a point of glancing over his head. There it was, his tag, BlackStar_1.

Around the room, the others from the desert town were there: BlackStar_2, 3, and so on.

The whole gang was back together again.

“So you respawned?” I said to BlackStar_1. “That's a cheese-dick way to keep playing, if you ask me.”

No response.

“I got you good,” I boasted. Empty words, to be sure. He wasn't the one about to get cut open.

He smiled. Maybe he liked to banter with the toys. “I didn't see you behind that mailbox, Phoenix. Good spot. Good move. But I guess that's why we give you all the tough gigs, huh?”

My turn to smile. “Let's play that scene again, bro. I'll come up with a better angle to counter a rigged gun.”

“Clever.” He nodded, then turned to a buddy. “Hand him a pistol.”

BlackStar_8 stood up, a redheaded guy with bad teeth, and pulled a nice chrome-plated Desert Eagle off a table. He walked over, freed my arm, and slapped the semiauto into my hand.

“Now,” BlackStar_1 said to me, “you can either shoot yourself in the head—and as soon as you do you go right back to Re-Sim and Mi and your home base—or you can use that huge thing to punch holes in me and everyone else in the room.”

I didn't think twice. I raised the gun right to his forehead and pulled the trigger.

CLICK!

Darn!

CLICK!

CLICK!

Empty! How many times were they going to pull
that?

BlackStar_1 smiled. Seemed like I'd given him the right response.

“See!” he barked at one of the other techs. “
Great
reaction time. No hesitation. I just don't see the issue here. Our numbers are still at an all-time high and growing steadily. Sales through the roof. Corporate loves
our
product. Phoenix, and every NPC like him, they're performing
flawlessly
, just like I predicted.”

“You don't get it yet, Max,” BlackStar_4 spat back at him. “The issue is not with
that
generation. The issue is with the new recruit.”

“Her?”

“Her.”

“Dakota?”

“I told you before what happened. About the anomaly.”

“Sam, she's been fighting just fine for weeks,” BlackStar_1 countered. “One inventive episode? Don't we
want
that? And it could have been a scratch on a disc. A bad relay cable. Anything. One little power surge and you all lose it.”

“But if it re-creates itself, if there's a virus or a bug of some kind crawling around in there, think about
that
. We could have a systems crash. What if all of our NPCs simply want to stop fighting? Our customers don't want to
talk
things out. They want to
shoot
things out. The whole thing would fold over-freakin'-
night
if we lose our edge.”

BlackStar_1—I'd gathered his actual name was Max—was nodding but seemed unconvinced. He asked, “Think you can replicate the error?”

“Even if we could, it's not like we could do anything about it other than erase that whole batch file. Once they're spiked, none of the units can be retroactively altered.”

I was starting to catch on. And it was some scary stuff. I liked Dakota. A lot. Good team member. Fun to watch fight. So what if she kooked out every now and then?

I hoped she was catching on too, because I was pretty sure the next couple of moments were going to determine the rest of her life. Or whether she'd have a rest of her life.

A bunch of the guys started punching buttons, configuring things, and generally acting like they were about to launch a space station.

“What do you want to do for an environment?” a tech asked. “Return her to the original landscape? That Nec war? Replicate every last battle condition?”

More voices:

“Do we have to go that far?”

“How about dropping her in the middle of imminent danger and seeing if that triggers the irrational response?”

“Didn't we just try that?”

I turned my head to look at Dakota, to see if she realized this whole thing was centered on her. All of it. From getting dropped into the
HILLS
environment to the chase to the fiery town battle to the long ride in the cage.

Even, I thought, giving us all that food and those hot showers.

The whole time, they'd been trying to elicit a particular response.

Did she get it?

Because they hadn't gotten that response yet.

Did she understand the way she was turning our universe upside down? The way she could, if she acted incorrectly, end my life? Her life? The team's lives? Mi and Reno and York, if they were back home at CO, might not even realize they were dying as the whole base was simply shut down.