Game Slaves (2 page)

We all dove too. Reno, York, Mi, Jevo, all of us.

Dakota erupted in a shower of red mist and electrical backlash.

When the battle resumed, there wasn't a piece of her left that was larger than a raindrop.

“OOOOOOOWWWWWWW!” Dakota moaned. I could tell the reassimilation was hurting, but that's usually the way it goes the first few times. Some soldiers can take it. Others have to let you know they don't like pain. That second kind is also prone to all sorts of other whining. I'll get back to that later.

She was lying on the operating table, the arms and beams from the giant machine quickly knitting her back together. A foot here. A leg there. Two hands. The organs and glands and blood vessels. Arteries were strung, sealed, and pressure-tested. Veins were filled with fresh blood. Eyeballs plopped into sockets, a synaptic wand stabbing in the side and neatly stitching the neurons to her oblongata.

“OH, man, this
HURTS!
” she cried.

“Of course it does,” I agreed, grabbing her left fingers to see if the feeling had returned. “You took a fusion grenade to the forehead, dummy. It isn't supposed to feel
good
.”

“They didn't tell me about that in training,” she spat, obviously angry that her drill sergeant had left out a few key facts.

“They assume you understand that getting shot or blown up or run over or disintegrated all the time isn't going to be a walk in the freakin' park.” The words came out of my mouth a little mean. Not sure why I lashed out like that; I really didn't have a reason. I kinda liked her so far. She must pack a different kind of guts to face a gamer without a weapon like that.

I noticed I was still holding her wrist. Not sure why about that, either. It looked different. Strong, tough, but . . . different.

“You're Phoenix.” She said it flat, like repeating a fact for a test. At the same time I saw her start massaging the ink around her hand.

“No one told me I was getting another body.”

And what a body too. You can't imagine. Some artist pulled out all the stops for this one. Built for war. Just plain built.

She'd taken her paw away, was making a fist. I wanted it back. Something along the palm . . .

Dakota sneered. “I do not plan to end up on this table. Not
ever
again.”

“I like the attitude, Dakota. Staying alive
is
the game. You sound like a winner.”

“I just don't like getting pulverized.”

“None of us do. Hop up, kid, let me show you around.”

The machine finished sewing her back together. She zipped her jumper but was wobbly as both boots hit the floor. Typical. Something about the first few times you go double-z. As in 00, when you die, no hit points or health left. Your equilibrium gets all messed up for a while. Anyway, she stumbled into me. Man, she was stacked, for war, for pinup photos, you name it. Head to toe, not a muscle or bulge out of place.

I could see her weaving as we walked. Didn't mind when she leaned against me, not one little bit. Just doing my duty for my team, right?

The inside of Central Ops was, you guessed it, constructed just like you'd want a cost-is-no-object top-secret military installation to be. Steel grates for walkways. Sliding doors. Cold gray walls and thick windows. Everything burly and tough and top of the line. Very little wasted space. Hall after hall with closely spaced cabins. Deck upon deck of them. You'd get completely lost if the coordinates of your location weren't painted every few steps on the floor.

At CO, no one gets lost because there's nowhere to go. You're totally enclosed except for the out-portals in mission control. Incoming mail goes straight to Re-Sim.

The place seems huge your first day, and then you realize how small it is.

“Where are my quarters?” Dakota asked, and of course this was my choice. I was team commander, and I'd planned to put her down below with the other new grunts, but on a whim, I changed my mind. We were on my deck now, and one of my corporals had just been promoted to Boss, so what the heck, I gave her his cube. That put her about five doors down from me, and again, why do that? She already seemed like a whiner.

Maybe it was that hand. We've all got the company tat, you know. Around the palm. Have had it as long as any of us can remember. But hers . . . now it hit me . . . hers was off somehow.

Dakota was an interesting addition to my squad, no doubt about it. That blond hair. Around the same age as the rest of us, which was in the prime of our fighting lives. But she wasn't built like a teenage girl. No, she walked like an athlete and moved like a warrior. You probably know the mold. You know it for all of us.

I was way over six feet, about 250, and all of it ripped muscle. I made the Hulk look like he should do a sit-up or two.

Wire hair. Block steel for a skull, iron girders for bones. And here's the kicker: none of us could legally join any military we'd ever heard of. Years-wise, we were too young. But it was all about combat experience, right? My squad was ten times as battle-hardened as any puss gray-haired general on any planet. We'd seen more, shot more, and suffered more than entire armies. Some days, we
were
entire armies.

Our whole regiment was the same way. You've seen us in games, in comics—we're the biggest of the big and the best of the best. Looking for a steamroller in combat boots? A truck in pants? A wrecking ball wearing army-green?

You found us.
And
you found a world of hurt.

But Dakota, the closer I got to her, the more time we spent together, there was something else. Something extra. A blackened core in those dark eyes. A gaze that made you shake a bit.

Strong, yes. Confident, absolutely.

But no one would forget her on the battlefield earlier. She sure hadn't shown much in the way of common sense when hot metal began tearing through soft flesh.

So I told her where to find things. The mess, where she could grab whatever she wanted to eat. The gym, where she could work out if she felt like it, clear the cobwebs or whatever. We had a library and a game room and a bunch of other spots to gather during off-hours, but interest in those really came and went.

Up ahead, my buddies, who'd been here almost as long as I'd been at CO, were just coming out of the section lounge. Drinks, games, chatter. It had a monitor for the latest outgoing missions, something we checked all the time. Like any military, we lived our lives on call. Long periods of boredom punctuated by intense moments of sheer terror.

“What's the drill?” I shouted to Reno. The boy just shook his big head, neck tendons rippling. He was always first to check for action. First to go over a hill or through a door. I trusted him with my life every single day of my life.

“Nothin'.”

“Nothin',” York echoed. He was always doing that. Going with the flow. Never a complaint. Dude was a monster, skin dark as shadow, the kind of bald beast you don't want to run into unless you've got a lot of friends around the corner.

Mi—full name Miami—was right behind them. Of course it had occurred to us all long ago that we'd each been named after some city or state or something in the United Zones of whatever they were calling it these days. Who really knew what was going on outside CO? Our information came straight through the propaganda channels. And even the little stuff we could glean from our enemies, from their chatter, from their habits . . . well, at least
we
had a safe place to sleep every night. Didn't seem like that was a common luxury these days.

You might have seen Mi around. She was a hottie. But in a complete-opposite-of-a-weak-supermodel kind of way. Body, brains, and brawn. Not to mention those eyes. If you ran into her on the front lines, trust me, you didn't forget. Something about when you mix radioactive green peering through coal-black locks. Her gaze was the last thing, the very last thing, a lot of gamers ever saw.

So, more about our names: I was probably from Arizona originally, Mi from the Orange State . . . New York, Nevada, Sarajevo, and so on. You'd have to be a complete moron not to have picked that up right away.

So of course the next question is, why not just go by our real names?

And that was the thing. The central point. None of us could remember our real name. None of us had any solid memories at all of where we were before we joined up. That part of our lives—how we got here, why we were here, where we came from—it was all a big blank in our heads. It was as if someone had kidnapped us, opened our skulls, and melon-balled out all the memory stuff. The only things they'd left behind were the training and the encrypted tattoos. We got blank slates, serial codes on our hands, and the ability to get blown to a million bits in insane battles day in and day out. Then they gathered up the debris and pieced us together again.

What a life.

Or was it even life?

It might have been death. None of us really had a clue. None of us really cared, either.

Not until Dakota started asking hard questions.

Our shift came up, like it always did, at around 1600. That's about when day workers come home from their slog and begin a lifelong quest to avoid reality and live inside video games instead. God bless 'em.

From four till about dinner, then for much of the night, those were prime duty hours. And that was when my regiment was on duty. Team Phoenix. Not to brag—OK, to brag—we're the best. We're the next-generation, cutting-edge, biggest, baddest group of kickass NPC AI mother-crushers that ever played game. We've got game. No, we
are
the game. We're the top team.

There were others. A vet named Rio ran a solid crew, kind of like us, but focused on previous-generation servers. She was tough. Two-dimensional attack strategies, but tough nonetheless.

Another guy, Lima, had a tight squad. Great at hand-to-hand, melee, the up-close-and-personal wetwork. Syd, Dub, Scow . . . I knew most of them, but
my
team topped every stat.

We played prime hours, the newest games, on the toughest settings, and we won more than most. Not all the time, obviously, but we won.

You wanted to be a real gamer? You had to beat my crew, day in and day out, across all the platforms, across all the games, and then, maybe then, you'd be pretty good.

 

There'd been a new release of
SLAUGHTER RACE EXTREME!
the day before, so it was no surprise we spent most of the shift in the cockpit of cross-country war machines, blasting our way from one coast to the next. The open scenery was great, city after city, all postnuclear, of course. No closed-in walls of an orbiting prison or abandoned outpost tonight. Freedom to speed. We were the band of evil slavers that had to be defeated by the Democratic Resistance.

Every vehicle had weapons. Some had rocket launchers. On the back of mine, Mi was manning—ha ha, womanning—a mini-gun from a rotating turret. We had a good run. The only real problem was she kept kicking me in the back of the head every time she spun to shoot cars on our six.

Side note here: Mi's hit rate was
over 90 percent
that day. She was popping gamer heads and kneecaps like they were water balloons filled with red dye.

Because of her accuracy alone, we lasted all the way to Vegas before someone laid a trap and we ran over a huge IED.
BOOM!
The concussion sent us a mile into the air, splitting our rig clean in two.

Mi's half tumbled away from the blast, back in the direction we'd come. And when I landed, I actually hit pretty soft, spun a 180, and limped my battered machine toward where she'd cratered in.

Bet you never saw game villains do that, right? Go back for one of their own?

“You should have left me here to bleed out,” Mi moaned, red goop pouring through broken teeth like drool from a baby's mouth.

“I wouldn't leave you.” I smiled, knowing that she'd played her last level today. “I'll always come back for someone who, well . . . shoots as dead straight as you.”

We could both see a heat seeker approaching from the south, arcing over, locked on, smoke trail a long curve and coming down to end it for us. Nice and quick. No way to run, nowhere to hide.

Flash of light. Then the explosion.

Woke up in reassimilation . . . Re-Sim . . . Like always, got a drink of water, quick bite to eat, and back on the road. Lots of miles to cover. Didn't seem like the gamers, whoever they were, had a curfew to worry about.

 

Late night, most of the younger gamers go to bed—we can tell because the voices change—so you'd think the violent gaming would die down. Think again. Those tend to be grownup hours. The language, the brutality . . . we really get to see what evil lurks in the hearts of men. Women. Grandparents. We see some cold, cold stuff.

So late night, new orders:
SAVAGE SEWERS
. We were back to the desolate wasteland, assigned to mutant duty in the radioactive tunnels below Old Denver. At least as
intelligent
monsters we could coordinate an attack on the Peacekeepers. (As usual, our minions—the zombie undead—had to just shamble from tunnel to tunnel, eating gamer bullets one after another. Sucked to be them.)

Mutant York had the idea of using our zombie horde as a diversion. Good call. York's what we call a “Stop 'n' Thinker.” Always takes an extra microsecond to analyze before he hacks 'n' slashes. That's a good quality to have on any team.

While ma-and-pa video-game addicts were shooting York's decoys, we got Mi and Reno in behind their position. There were six gamers playing co-op over their controllers—from the voice chatter I caught that they were all part of the same hoity-toity country club during the day—and we took them out quite a few times before they figured out our strategy.

Then, the last run, those tennis moms and squash dads figured out where our hidey-hole
was and went to the locker to switch up weapons. Flamethrowers. Ouch. They cooked us good.