Stormfuhrer (10 page)

“
Exactly!  Moral dilemmas . . . right and wrong.  We need to be teaching that kinda thing nowadays!  God knows too many parents don't!”

“
The problem is . . . at least this is what I suspect . . . is that they were mostly making the wrong choices.  Promotion . . . sometimes survival . . . in the game often requires them to make choices that hurt other players.”

“
They were learning dammit!”  Mason’s face was turning bloodshot.

Hayes was quiet.  “They were learning,” he repeated.  That was certain.  It was hopeless trying to convince Mason to keep the game out of the school.  Sure, the school got more funds when attendance was up, but that wouldn’t completely explain why, even in the face of a lawsuit, a guy like Mason wanted to keep the game going.  Hayes himself knew the incredible educational value of the game, and Mason thought that it might act as an outlet for the  students, a relief valve for their teen angst, but Hayes saw a danger in it that Mason wasn't seeing.  He doubted that bringing it back would make the armbands disappear.

Then again, these seniors would graduate in May and that would be the end of it, regardless of what happened in their lives afterward.  No, the school still had a responsibility to keep students safe, even if it meant that they learned less, a lot less.  Mason, as rare as he was--an instructional leader among managers and highly-paid state exam clerks--didn’t see the game as a safety issue.  That meant he didn't really link the game to the Muniz boy's assault.  To him it was just an online game.

Richard left the man’s office.  Hayes’ balding crown was sweating, and the edges of his curly tufts of hair had become damp.  He wiped his pate and looked at the perspiration on his hand.  It wouldn’t be long before everyone in the small town knew that the Muniz boy was never in any car accident.  It was even likely that Hayes was one of the last to find out.  There would be hell to pay if anything like this ever happened again.

Hayes went back up to his classroom.  Late afternoon approached and his classroom was dark.  He inched his way to the back of the room near the window where his desk now sat.  He had moved it away from the door last summer in hopes of decreasing Farash’s predictable visits during the man’s most stressful class periods--the two periods during which all the “good” kids were either in athletics or band.  Hayes lay back in his rolling chair, well hidden behind his desk, and stared at the ceiling, his arms lying limp at his sides.  Even though there was no direct link between the game and the boy’s severe injuries, Hayes felt responsible.  Guilt rose up in him and he felt himself there, some part of himself watching, there at the place of the crime.  He decided that he would force himself to sleep in his classroom tonight.  There was no game for him now, no desire in him to play, revulsion rather, but he felt that he at least owed the Muniz kid this tiny piece of sacrifice, this time to think things over.  He might even talk to some of the seniors in the morning, get some details from those wearing the armbands.  It was Thursday, and knowing he might not sleep at all tonight, he could make up for it with a long slumber in his little cabin over the weekend.

Richard lay sprawled in his big chair, scratching a little box into the pray-painted window until the white flakes of paint got under his nails.  He looked through the little transparent box he had made.  A street lamp positioned over the students’ parking lot sent a shaft of light through the aperture.  He stared through this, and, feeling cold, grabbed a small blanket that lay folded on his bookshelf.  The cover over him felt soft and warm, protective somehow.  The aircon was blowing lightly against the blanket and the night outside the window was silent.

It was 10:15 PM and the door handle began to rattle at the far corner of the room.  Hayes looked up from his chair, instantly alarmed.  He had fallen asleep somehow while staring through the aperture he had made in the painted glass.  He thought about the thick steak knife he kept in his desk; then his mind leaped to a long, whittled stick that he had confiscated from a student four years before, which he’d forgotten to turn in to the principal’s secretary.  He reached for the stick, which stood behind a corner of the bookshelf behind his desk. 

He couldn’t remember if he had locked the door or not.  The door opened slowly.  A figure glided to the first console nearest the classroom door.  The cardboard boxes had all been removed many weeks before.

The screen blinked on, brightening that side of the room with a ghostly light.  Hayes could now see the figure, clearly male, slim.  The man shook his head as if to throw off an unwanted idea and mounted the thick headset upon his dark head.  After putting on the studded gloves and sitting down into the unit, he began tapping his fingers across the keys rapidly, expertly.

Richard sat in near darkness at his desk.  He eased up in his chair as the tapping of the keys filled the room.  The figure had covered himself with one of the dark afghans folded on a nearby desk, which some of the students had brought to keep themselves warm when the aircon blowing directly on them became unbearable.  The intruder was like a giant, web-covered insect, waving his arms and murmuring low into his headset.  He kept his eyes no more than eight inches from the screen and quickly became wholly absorbed in what was happening on the screen.  He was, of course, playing the Game.

Richard’s chair creaked a bit as he sat up.  He took a number of minutes to do so lest he be heard.  The man was so absorbed, however, that Hayes felt he could have jumped up and down just behind the man and gotten no
response.

He wanted the man gone, but he was also curious.  Now that the game was officially forbidden, he also felt a duty to see what was happening on the screen.  Apparently, his mandate against the game had had no effect whatever on this particular student.  Sure, he never actually told any of them that playing the game was now officially
verboten
, but he also no longer made the room available for the game before or after school hours, never allowed time for it outside other planned activities during any given class period.  It was a
de facto
law that this player had decided to break.

Richard Hayes stared at the figure for some time.  The figure leaned forward, unlike a teenager or a young man.  He seemed old, weary, physically broken down in his afghan shroud, but alert.  Richard crept up to the figure from behind, intent on perhaps scaring the daylights out of him if his, Richard’s, presence were detected, as it eventually would be.

The figure was covered bodily by the black afghan, its knots loosely woven.  His fingers busied themselves in the gloves, with one hand occasionally slapping at the mouse ball or tapping a word or two across the keys.  Hayes crept along the wall, out of the immediate view of the figure.  Gradually, he stood behind the man.   On the screen stood a figure dressed in a white suit with horizontal shoulders perpendicular to a thin, vertical neck.  The character in the screen nodded frequently and spoke quickly. 

The figure under the afghan was barking his whispered orders to the man in the light suit as the man nodded quickly but with dignity.  Eventually, they walked down a long hallway together, the figure under the afghan still barking orders in a low murmur.  Some of what he was saying was in German and was therefore heard more quickly by the character on the screen than his English phrases, as they passed through the lightning-quick translation matrix.

Hayes, from several feet behind, saw the men enter a room in which a large red banner was draped down a wall, covering an area of chimney above an enormous fireplace.  About six feet in front of it stood a large table laden with papers, files, and the vegetable makings of salads in individual glass bowls.  A fire was raging through the grate below the banner, giving off warm, crackling sounds in the otherwise dimply-lit and well-furnished room.  “Clearly playing a character of huge importance,” Hayes mumbled to himself.

Hayes decided to retreat, letting the man finish this sequence of the game.  However, he watched from behind his desk.  The player never moved his head enough in Richard’s direction to reveal details about his face, but he could tell from the accent who it was.  As much as he was amused by Farash—for that was the only way he could describe his  attitude regarding the teacher--the man was sneaky.  He wondered how long Farhat had been playing the game in which he had previously, at least on the surface, showed almost no interest.

At some point during the early morning, Hayes fell asleep in the chair behind his desk.  He knew that he had nothing to fear from the visitor and had completely forgotten about the penance he had assigned for himself that night.  When he awoke near dawn, the figure had already slipped out of the room.

Summer 2023

Hayes had struggled with the decision from the end of the semester into the early summer.  However, he finally decided to reinstate the game as part of his curriculum for the following year.  Perhaps Mason was right about the students needing an outlet.  It had been a long, rough semester keeping them engaged—the most difficult semester he could remember.  Maybe it wasn’t the game that caused problems at all but rather the ending of it.   It was only natural that some of the Darwinian aspects of the game would continue in the relationships between the students themselves--perhaps heightened now by their inability to work out the frustrations in their lives through the choices they made from the endless options the game provided.  At least one could not refute the educational benefits the teaching tool. 

Richard himself would also return to it.  In the many months he had played as a camp guard, however, Richard Hayes had leveled much, moving in the Party from mere Block Operations Foreman to Cell Leader in only a year and a half.  As far as his military rank, his effectiveness in the camp had propelled him from
Obersturmführer
(First Lieutenant) to
Sturmbannführer
(Major) just below the camp commander, the
Standartenführer
.  This had been the only character he had ever used in the game, in fact the only one he could use now--unless it had died somehow during his absence--and he wanted to see if he could, at some point, run the camp using this avatar.

He would start to play again the following evening at 10:00 PM.  Time flowed in the game exactly as it did in the real world.  An hour equaled an hour.  Even the time zones were the same, albeit 83 years in the past.  Since a character needed regular periods of sleep, Richard could come into the game with a refreshed avatar at about the time the character was supposed to wake up.  The seven-hour time difference between Texas and Germany would bring him into the game at 5:00 AM in Dachau, which is when the performance of his duties normally began.

CHAPTER 6

When Richard Hayes first went back to the game in his tiny cabin, he had a difficult time understanding where he was.  When he opened his eyes, a dizziness made the screen in his helmet waver, or perhaps this was merely the result of his regaining his sense of visual perspective in the game.  It had taken some getting used to those months back.

When he entered, it was early morning, as he had expected.  But lights burned from raw bulbs above his head.  These were screwed into the ends of thin, long cables suspended from thick supporting beams beneath an A-frame barracks-type roof.  The beds of the sick ward were positioned as one would expect, parallel, with the pillowed ends nearest the walls.  There was a walkway between the two rows of beds lining the walls of the long, narrow building.  The walls beneath the high roof were made of cinder block, thickly painted a light tan. 

Hayes lifted the cursor control with wireless gloved hands and
Sturmführer
Heinrich Mauer, Hayes’ character, began to sit up.  It was difficult and Hayes had difficulty keeping the character from falling off the bed.  The ward
was
a kind of barracks, but with white sheets hanging as screens between some of the beds.  He looked to a metal nightstand to the right of his own bed and found several medicines bottles beside a half-glass of what he assumed to be water.  At his feet lay a white porcelain bedpan.

A number of the iron beds contained sleeping inhabitants, but the majority were empty and tightly made up with dark woolen blankets and white sheets folded over the upper edge from underneath, just below the pillows.

A kitchen matron, a prisoner, was pushing a cart through the walkway in the center of the room among the beds, ladling soup into bowls from a large, stainless steel tureen and placing the bowls on the night stands of the occupied beds.  Her black hair was covered by a yellow rag.  Hayes recognized her immediately but said nothing.  He lay back in his bed, playing his part.  When she finally came to his bed, he touched her arm.

“
Savina.” 

She placed the bowl and looked at him steadily.

“Savina, why am I here?”

She just stood, glaring at him.  Eventually, she brought her face close to his ear and whispered rapidly in response:  “If I could kill you, I would, Herr Sturmführer.  I would put rat poison in this German soup of yours.  And do you know why?  Because I don’t care anymore, you bastard.  Kill me if you want.  Go on.”  The young woman was clearly shaken by her own words.  Her eyes, though dark and beautiful, were bloodshot and her tight mouth trembled, but she seemed to be waiting for a response from him.  Then, when nothing came, she returned to her tureen and continued passing out bowls of soup, seeming to pay him no more attention.

He had been away for a while, true.  Months in fact.   He knew from experience that things could change greatly in one’s absence.  “Life” in the game didn’t pause between human interactions.

She had addressed him merely as “Sturmführer,” a second lieutenant.  That was odd.  He looked around for a jacket, a cap, anything that would reveal his current rank.  He looked under the sheet--he was dressed in a hospital gown.  Nothing else he saw around him gave any more meaning to his situation.  He had little to go on for the decisions he would have to make.  Additionally, the screen in his helmet blurred now and then.  His character was apparently very tired or very ill.  Richard too was getting sleepy, and until now hadn’t realized just how little sleep he had gotten in the last few days.  As the screen went dark with the passing out of the avatar, Richard too fell asleep at his table in the small cabin.

“You almost died, Mauer.”

It had taken a day and a half for Richard to again return in the form of his avatar.  The man simply wouldn’t wake up.  Finally, he was back in the game.  The image was still a bit shaky but Hayes recognized the man standing over him as
Schutzhaftlagerführer
Alexander Piorkowski, the economic functionary of the camp.  From all appearances, he had become the new camp Commandant.  He wondered about Hans Loritz, the previous commandant, a man with an especially cruel streak where the prisoners were concerned. 

As much as cruelty could go rewarded, it could also be taken too far.  Hayes had seen guards relieved of duty for repeatedly committing acts of cruelty.  As far as he knew, his character had done so only one time—an excusable offense in the eyes of his superiors though a time on which he did not easily reflect. 

This man, about 36, looked almost exactly like is predecessor.  He took a seat at the side of Mauer’s bed, and, not bothering to take off his gloves, felt the forehead of his officer.  “Still has a fever though his skin isn’t quite as yellow as it was.” 

“
Herr Mauer!  Hello?  Can you hear me?”  He snapped his fingers a few times in front of Mauer’s eyes.  “I’m sure you’ve heard about your demotion.” The camp commander wasted no time getting to the point.  “It was the most disgraceful thing I’ve ever seen committed by an officer of the SS.”

“
What did I do?” Richard was able to cough out a few words.  One of the other officers that had accompanied the Commandant chuckled briefly.

“
What you did do, you drunken bastard, involved several Polish female inmates, a mop closet, and a case of Russian vodka.  So, other than ‘What did I do’ . . . what do you have to say for yourself, Sturmführer Mauer?”  Commandant Piorkowski was frowning, his small gray eyes staring directly into Richard’s own eyes from below a high forehead, his blondish hair slicked way back.

“
I . . . I what?” Richard stammered into the microphone in the helmet and thought for a few seconds, wondering what
else
Heinrich Mauer might have actually done in his absence.  At first, Richard thought to mask his confusion with the appearance of self-loathing, maybe even tears; he knew the keystrokes for bringing them up.  But then the Commandant spoke again, this time in a whisper near his left ear:

“
I would have thrown you in with the scum in the fourth block as a state criminal had it not been for the fact that we’re so damned short-handed.  We need everyone.  And we need them sober, not stinking drunk and breaking the Fuhrer’s racial purity laws.”

The Commandant looked genuinely disgusted, scowling at his inferior officer.  “I’ve put in to have you transferred to the front, just as soon as a decent replacement can be found.  Tomorrow, you’ll be back in the courtyard, and since now every officer in the camp knows you to be a
betrunken Arschloch
you may as well keep to yourself until you leave.  It would be the respectable thing to do, though the concept of self-respect seems to elude you completely.”  The Commandant rose from the bed and directed a German nurse that “under any circumstances, Heinrich will be fit for duty by tomorrow morning.  For tonight, let him sleep--Herr Doktor tells me that Mauer’s liver has swollen to the size of his head.  I would not have thought that possible.”  He abruptly left the room.  Mauer’s consciousness waned.

Hours later, the screen embedded in the helmet, no more than three inches away from Richard’s eyes, brought a faint light but with no distinct images.  As Mauer briefly re-entered consciousness, a female voice whispered into his ears.  “I will cut your throat as you sleep.”  Darkness dominated the helmet screen once again for hours.

Richard as Heinrich Mauer awoke once again to find himself staring at the dark wooden beams above.  Artificial light originating from outside the building fell slanting across the hospital beds from the high windows.  Otherwise, everything was dark.  Richard himself felt an itch just to the right and below his sternum.  Scratching with his left hand, he then directed Mauer with his right to rise and put on the uniform that now lay draped over the back of a chair to his left.  This took some time.  He then walked about the room, testing the health of his stumbling avatar.  Not good.  Soon, he was walking out of the hospital room and amongst the camp’s prison barracks, an agonizing headache penetrating the barriers of technology and time that lay between avatar and player.

It was very dark even under the stars, with spotlights from corner and side towers probing the distant woods and hills, along the perimeter of the camp, and finally into some of the barracks' windows.  Mauer walked along the inside of the barbwire’s perimeter, along the barracks-side of a ditch that lay two meters away from the electrified fence.  He nodded to a fellow guard he met walking the other way.  A spotlight flooded around him and the ground beneath for a few seconds and then loomed again about the rooftops of the barracks.  He walked for hours, trying to consider his role in the game.  He was Heinrich Mauer, newly demoted to mere Sturmführer, second lieutenant in the camp SS squad.  He had been a major.  It would have been tremendously humiliating if it were real.  He had dropped three ranks, his collar lapel now displayed three diamonds instead of four, several of his metals were gone.  The large iron cross no longer hung from the center of his collar.  He thought about the many months he had worked to gain his title of
Sturmbannführer
,
and somehow it was now all for nothing. 
Sinlos . . .
Pointless. 

Another SS officer walked past, nodding to him, as if he didn’t notice the new lack of metal and greatly simplified patchwork on his arm.  Sturmführer.  He felt like tossing it all, like grabbing a gun and killing every soldier in the camp.  I’ll start with this guy, he thought.  He knew he wouldn’t get far—three perhaps, maybe four.  He had never done anything so remotely volatile with his avatar.  It would ruin his presence in the game, but he was starting to not care.  The spell of its enchantment was continuing to wear off, this game, this other-life that seemed so much more real than his own--the life he'd led as Richard Hayes, the stale life he had lived for so long before its discovery.

Richard felt in Mauer’s pockets for some food as he was getting hungry, forgetting that feeding the character would do little to assuage his own pangs.  Still, he brought out a bar of some kind wrapped in soft tissue.  He munched it and could almost taste its dry, fruity, nutty texture in his own mouth.  After eating it, Richard Hayes himself felt strangely satisfied and, though fatigued, continued the game.  Still walking the fence perimeter, he crumpled the tissue and tossed the wrapper just outside the first layer of barbed wire.

A dreary, cold stillness pervaded the spaces between the cabins with a windless silence.  Faint breathing could be heard through the empty spaces between A-frame roofs and walls.  He found Savina’s wooden barracks, near the hospital and not very far from the long row of narrow cells where some of the political prisoners were taken and held, often indefinitely.  He knocked lightly.  Nothing stirred.  He knocked again, and then unbolted the door from the outside.  As he entered, he whispered among the bunks, three high.  “Frau Bender . . . Savina.” 

“She is at the other end, Herr Offizier,” replied a female voice.

“
Danke.”

The bright artificial lamps just penetrated the slight horizontal openings  that served for windows above the bunks.  He found her, still, under a thin, dark blanket.  Her head was turned toward the wall, but he knew her dark, cropped hair and profile well enough to recognize her.  On her other side lay two other women, both sleeping heavily.

“Savina.  I need to speak with you.” he whispered.

There was a pause.  She didn’t move.

“Savina, you don’t know me.  I . . .”

“
And why should I care to know you?” was the whispered reply.  She knew who it was without turning to look. 

“
Because I can get you out of here.”

Another pause.  “And become what, your slave, your prostitute?”  Her head was still turned to the wall.

“Your friend.”

“
Friend.”  The slight covered mound shook as she quietly laughed a deep chuckle.  “And this is how you treat your friends?”

“
What?  Do you mean waking you up in the middle of the night?”

“
I mean raping me in the g-d--mn commissary closet, you Nazi pig!”

“
What? Richard was taken aback.  He repeated her words under his breath back to her.  In the corner of his little cabin, he removed the interactive helmet.  It was all too real in there.  Much too real now.  He had to look at something, anything familiar, and he focused on the sound of a football game behind him, the volume respectfully lowered, and the flickering images reflected faintly on the man on the couch behind the massive TV.  He heard the faint snore of Carlos, crashed on his couch under white bed sheet.

Richard looked at the helmet.  It was not enough to leave after beating the woman to death at the “parade” grounds.  He had to come back.  He had fallen for a girl who didn’t exist, a computer-generated fiction.  That was the real reason he'd returned.  He had grown feelings for someone who amounted to nothing more than a sequence of electrons passing near light-speed through circuits and motherboards.  Or perhaps he was simply acting
as if
he had feelings for someone who was real, playing a role, and doing an excellent job of playing make-believe in a world permanently separate from his own pathetic life.  “
Maybe she is
an avatar,” he thought.  That would explain the draw he had to her, a real affection for another human being.  He actually cared what happened to her, not something he could say about most people.