Stormfuhrer (3 page)

The soldier began to talk lightheartedly, lighting a cigarette and offering one to Hayes—or more accurately, to Hayes’ avatar.  The outline of the man's uniform looked Third Reich.  Richard quickly got the gist of what the man was saying through the with repeated voiced-over translations.  Apparently, he thought that Richard, or more accurately, his avatar, had had too much to drink the night before and had had no sleep since.

The truck began to move.  Absorbed in the realism of the images and surrounding sounds, Richard began to feel himself moving in his chair and grabbed his desk for support.  It jarred him momentarily out of what had been a brief, trance-like state that had only been temporarily interrupted when he felt that he had to grab the edge of the table, realizing again that there
was
a table.

He looked around his room and then back to the screen.  The headphones had fallen to his neck when he had jerked sideways.   He got up to grab a bottle of water from the small refrigerator.  As soon as he left his place in front of the screens, everything on the screens went black.  Grabbing the water, he quickly crawled back up into his makeshift computer tent.  The screens were blank.  Pressing Enter, found his desktop and double-clicked the browser icon.  He quickly typed in the web address and found himself back in the truck in the same position though now on a different street.  Nothing had paused in the game while he was out of it.  The truck was traveling on a street between city blocks, but in front of him sat the same silhouette of the man who had helped him into the truck.  Twilight was approaching.

The soldiers in the truck were talking again.  Two of them were talking loudly and there was plenty of laughter, particularly coming from his right side.  He turned his avatar’s head to the right by turning the mouse ball slightly clockwise, suppressing the momentary desire to do so with his own head.  The man seated next to him was wearing a uniform slightly lighter in color than the others, and on his head was a darker helmet.  Seated on the bench across from Hayes and to his right was a soldier who seemed not as jovial as the other two.   This soldier stared at Hayes, or rather, at his avatar.  He too was dressed in the lighter colored uniform and wore the same a helmet as the man seated to the immediate right of Hayes’ character.  Military police?

A tall, clear bottle of golden liquid was being passed around, but Hayes had no idea what combination of keys was needed to drink anything, so he shook his head subtly as it came his way.

Richard looked to his left through the tarp’s opening and past the truck’s tailgate.   It had begun to rain.  The rain seemed to come from above and just to the back of Hayes’ head, tapping against the tarp.  The stereo-phonics were amazing!  The truck continued to roll through the city, pausing briefly at checkpoints and crossing over bridges.  The city’s buildings loomed old and dark.

He must have looked silly to the characters in the game, jerking this foot and that shoulder, standing up slightly and sitting down, as he tapped keys and then corrected, but if he had seemed odd, it wasn’t noticed, except maybe by the soldier who kept looking at him from his diagonal right.

Richard decided to try speaking.  He pulled the microphone arm of the headphones down over his mouth and spoke in a whisper into the headset microphone.  “Testing, testing.”  The soldier beside him turned to look in his direction.  The others were distracted.  “Hello everyone.”  This time he spoke clearly.  The soldiers looked at him. “'Hello,' he says!  Welcome back Mauer.  You look like
Hundescheiße
!” All were either laughing or smiling.  Apparently, not every word would be translated.

After much of the initial confusion, Hayes felt that he was starting to get a feel for the game.  An hour had passed, then another.  Apparently, keystroke combinations were needed to show emotions, like smiling or anger.  A small generic face appeared, in the bottom corner of the screen, when an emotion had been changed, the face reflecting the current emotion and then fading out.  And endless combinations existed between the keys, the gloves, and the mouse, causing actions and reactions, though it all seemed quite intuitive.  At one point, the soldier across from him asked a question that he didn’t quite catch due to the noise of the truck.  He felt that the best thing to do was simply to narrow his eyes in the direction of the opening in pretended exhaustion, but possibly also displaying nausea.  The soldiers laughed again and started passing another bottle.

The events didn’t involve the immediate or constant drama of a first-person shooter.  Rather, things happened in real time.  One second equaled one second.  And no one shot anyone, at least not yet.  Also, no one seemed able to do anything beyond what could be done in the real world.  He himself couldn’t carry three objects in one hand nor jump any higher or farther than a person could have in real life.  Still, it was exciting, mostly because of the reactions in others that his avatar’s actions would cause. 

There came a point at which he wanted to elicit more significant reactions from the others.  He had his character focus his eyes on the man in the seat diagonal from him.  With the mouse-ball pushed forward, he lean towards the seated figure.  He raised and closed his right gloved fist.  He saw the same fist on the screen, repeating the same exact actions.  He rotated his fist.  The fist on the screen  responded.  The soldier scowled again in his direction.  He lunged the fist forward, moving the mouse-ball only a few inches.  His whole body went with it as it launched toward the chin of the man.  The soldier saw it coming and jerked his head back, missing the punch but clinking his helmeted head against one of the steel braces that supported the truck’s tent enclosure.

Faintly,
“Vas war das?”
and loudly in almost the same instant,“What was that?”  The man stared at him, confused.  The others watched in silence.  He chose to try it again, this time with the other arm.  Coming from the left side of his body, It reached the soldier but with greater difficulty.  The soldier was alert and deflected it with his right hand.  The man then stood up and grabbed Hayes by the head with both hands, pressing down, forcing his head to the floor of the truck bed.  He hammered down hard on the back of his neck with one hand.  Hayes’ character fell flat, the screen was lit up by the flash of a blurry light.  A second later and the screen went black.  He tried various keys, but nothing moved in the blackness of the screen. He exited his browser back to the desktop and reopened it, putting in the address over and over.  Nothing.  Finally, the need for sleep overtook him and he closed the browser, dragging himself to the couch.

After a few hours of sleep, Richard Hayes awoke and placed the headphones back onto his head.  He tried numerous times to return to the game, but the black screen remained.

Richard Hayes lay on the old couch.  He forced himself to wait a full thirty minutes between attempts to reopen the browser window at the walküre.allein website.  Staring from the couch at the distant beam that held up the a-frame of his roof, Richard realized that it was the complexity, the realism, that must be drawing him to the game.  Occasionally, especially when many images had gone by—like when he had looked out from the back of the truck bed into the midst of the city—the screen would lag a bit with tiny freezes, as if the processor in his computer weren't enough to handle the tremendous detail.  But in reality the lag had been almost imperceptible, taking away nothing from the experience.

At first he checked the website every thirty minutes, then every hour.  It was twelve hours before he could make something reappear on the screen.  One apparently played the role of a German soldier, stationed probably in Munich, by the looks of the buildings and architecture he could somewhat recognize.  There was no log-in, no company name, no title screen.  Once your browser opened the game, there was a brief fade-in and you were there.

When Richard Hayes was finally able to return to the game, he had left the truck, was perhaps carried out.  He found himself in an infirmary.  There were large, high windows behind his bed that were so clean one could eat off them.  Everything was spotless.  A few nurses were moving silently from bed to bed in what he soon realized was a very long, pillared building.  Interesting, but not very exciting.  He stood his character up.  He was still in a uniform and, from the extreme detail, noticed that it had become very wrinkled.

It was clear that there really wasn’t much constant action that would justify the repeated playing of this game.  But it wasn’t the appeal of bloodshed and heroic moves that eventually had Hayes playing the game over and over, for hours at a time, for days eventually, with little sleep.  It was the complexity, the reality of the situation in which his character was involved, the seemingly endless map, the exhaustive research that must have gone into his character’s creation and the creation of the world within which he interacted.  Tremendous detail had been put into every little piece of it.  Normally in a first-person shooter, a trashcan, for instance, might be a copy of all the other trash cans in the game, but in this game each trash can, for he found himself looking around for such details, was always a bit different from all the others.  He could detect no repeated patterns in the textures of objects.

For weeks, Hayes pulled himself away from the game just long enough to sleep his four hours a night, to make coffee, to feed Fraulein, or to heat up a frozen dinner.  Occasionally, Carlos might stop by, but his visits were always brief.

By early August, Hayes had come to a few realizations about the game.  First, the game might be some sort of language-learning program.  The longer one stayed into the game, the more German and less English was used by the other characters.  Secondly, the characters in the game reacted to the words of the player, usually in a convincing way.  Over the weeks, Hayes began responding to his fellow Germans in their language, haltingly at first, often receiving some curious looks.  He would use German words as he learned them and replace the others with English, often in the same sentence.  The word order wasn’t perfect, but he did what he could.  At times he could detect a second or two of lag during which a translation program must have been hard at work attempting to transform his words into something usable by the characters in the game.  This pause occurred especially when he mixed the words of both languages into the same sentence.  Other characters’ reactions then reflected responses more or less appropriate to what he had said, or intended to say.  Such complexity.  Finally, he learned that everything happened in real time.  When his character slept, he had to wait—usually about six or seven hours—before playing the character again.  In these instances, the screen would go gray, and he knew that meant sleep.  In these instances, he had no control.  He simply had to leave the screen where it was and wait for the avatar’s “eyes” to open again.  The avatar's character would then awaken and perform movements on his own for a brief moment until finally under Richard's full control.

The character was SS.  He worked in a prison camp that Hayes soon learned was Dachau, the Bavarian camp near Munich, one of the first camps to spring up during the Third Reich.  It wasn’t a mass extermination camp.  In fact, based on dates he would see on calendars and in newspapers, it was 1939, a few years before the mass deportations and the “final solution” had been formally authorized by Hitler and organized by Adolf Eichmann.

There was a knock at the door.  Richard reluctantly removed the headset and got up to answer it.  It was Carlos, his neighbor, carrying a large square box.

“
Hello!” Richard said.  Not wishing to appear rude, though every cell in his body wanted to return to the screens.  He was still wearing his studded gloves.

“
I just bring this by.  Is Monday night.  Can I watch?” replied Carlos in his heavily accented voice, a big smile permeating his kind, moustachioed face.  It took Richard a second to process, and then he realized that the package was for him.  It was about the size of box that might hold a large human head.

“
The game!” persisted Carlos.  The game . . .  What does he want?  Richard stared at Carlos, squinting,  vacantly rubbing his balding scalp.  The game.  “Oh, you mean football?”  Monday Night Football.  “Well, I did not mean
La Loteria
!” Carlos laughed good-naturedly, displaying a front tooth rimmed in gold.

“
Of course, my friend, of course!  Come in!  What’s in the box?”

“
It’s yours.  It came to my house.”  Richard found it quicker to have things shipped to
la casa de Carlos
rather than receive the slip in his small mailbox that required him to drive to the post office to receive the bigger packages.  Carlos' mailbox was huge.  Besides, Carlos could be depended on to show up at least twice a week, if not more frequently, and he trusted Carlos completely, since the hurricane.  Once, when Richard was at a staff-development conference in Lubbock, there had been a surprising shift in the direction of Hurricane Minnie.  She decided that, instead of driving into the coast of Galveston, she would instead head due west, into the heart of the Rio Grande Valley.  She was a vixen from the start, originating as a category three from nearly absolute calm, quickly developing into a category five, even as she reached landfall.  When Richard returned home, after the storm had finally declined into a tropical depression, dumping megatons of rain into the Laredo area on its path to oblivion, he found his windows boarded and Fraulein safe in Carlos Fuentes’ home.  Though there had been some flooding, not a single pane of glass had been cracked in Richard's cabin.  After that, Carlos was a friend without question.