Game Slaves (7 page)

Did Dakota
know?

She watched them all move. One tech was talking about the weather that day, the day of the error. The others were searching for the random gamers who'd played in our session. Another was pulling up a schematic of the actual concrete debris she'd hidden behind.

I got it. I knew. It all made sense now.

At the time, we'd just thought she was chicken. But in the real world, somewhere, somehow, word of her actions, or her
inaction,
had gotten back to BlackStar and gone all the way up the chain to the company president, Mr. BlackStar_1 himself.

BlackStar_1.

Max . . . something.

His last name escaped me. But it was there, somewhere, in my memory. Maybe a game title. Something. From a long time ago. It just wouldn't cipher itself out right this minute.

Max was watching his team work to try to re-create the conditions that had led to that particular game systems failure on that particular day. Finally, after listening to them bicker about ambient music and gore settings and if the y-axis needed to be inverted . . . finally, he'd had enough.

Wherever that guy was out there in the real world playing this game, this scene, this level, whatever he actually looked like, his body did the same thing it did in here.

He strode purposefully over to my table. I could see the anger in his eyes, could read the fear that was beginning to build. I could almost smell it. And why not? This was where I lived. This was my world. I was a permanent resident. They were only tourists. The weekend warriors. They dropped in and out like it was some kind of digital vacation.

Max picked up the gun. I let him have it. He yanked out the magazine, inserted a full load, cocked the slide as expertly as any SWAT commando on the planet, and turned to Dakota.

He removed her shackles.

All of them.

And we watched as she tipped off the examination table and stood eye to eye with the BlackStar company founder.

She was equal in height. Stronger. Muscle tone and obsidian eyes. Standing there confidently, almost daring anyone in the room to suggest that she was no more than some kind of two-dimensional gaming enemy.

Max offered her the gun. She took it with her left hand, then tossed the heavy metal into her right, fingers and palm landing on the trigger and grip as easily as if she were brushing back a strand of hair.

BlackStar_1 grinned at her.

“This is not a similar set of conditions for the experiment, Max,” the guy named Sam snarled.

“It's loaded,” Max told Dakota.

“Something like this would punch a hole in your head as big as a fist.” She grinned as she said it.

“Use it.” He waved around to his team and to the observers overhead. “You could finish us all off and we'll send you right back to your base. Him too.” He waved at me. “You can both go home.”

Dakota's smile left quick. “That's not my home, and
you
know it.”

Max didn't answer. He didn't even try.

She continued, “Why do we have to fight? Why can't we just try to get along? What's the point in all that killing?”

The room was silent, other than a smart-mouth in the back who muttered, “Corporate dominance. Food on my table. Quarterly bonuses . . .”

“Shut up,” Max said to him, then looked at the one he'd called Sam. “See? We don't need the battlefield. It wasn't
fear
that made her not want to fight that day.”

“Not fear?” Sam asked, incredulous. “Then what?”

No one said a thing.

“What now?” he asked. “What do we do with an NPC who's not going to get with the program? She's not a freakin' medic. No more hand surgeries. She needs to
fight
.”

“We'll go back to the original versions,” another tech suggested.

“Impossible,” a third replied. “Gamers are used to smarter enemies. They don't want to go back to eating a bunch of yellow dots or battling a monkey who throws barrels one after another.”

Another suggestion. “We could shut down for a week and hunt the virus . . .”

“It's not a virus, it's a
systemic
infection . . .”

“You're crazy, it's biological. Talking too much has to do with Dakota's gender.”

“Menstrual? Ha! Don't be an
idiot
. These systems are not male or female dependent. We have plenty of female NPCs who are even more merciless than the males.”

“Now
you're
being an idiot. Of course the subject has a sex. Look at her! They also have an age and preferences and tendencies just like we need them to have to be unique. It's
all
in there.”

A moment of silence, then it started back up again.

“So we erase the Dakota version? Keep the Phoenix series? And never let a word of this out.”

Now it quieted down. All the techs, all the observers, they began to glance over at Max. He was the one who had to make the decision.

Finally, he spat out a breath of air.

He panned around. “I don't think it's as bad as it seems. So one of the NPCs wants to
reason
with gamers? We have no proof it's systemic. We have no indication that her series will all develop this fault. So what if, every now and then, in some game, in some online arena, one of the enemy throws up her hands and wants to talk things out?”

“It's just, well, unnatural,” Sam moaned. “At least, in there it is.”

“I agree,” Max decided, “but it's not a deal killer like you all had me thinking. In fact, it might be an interesting twist. Maybe we can profit off her. The team might secretly strap her with remote control explosives, and when she lures the gamers in for a peace talk with the seductive blond NPC, she blows them up!”

Some mumblings spread; ideas began to form.

“She could be the
unwilling
kamikaze pilot . . . ?”

“The world's first superhottie suicide bomber?”

“No, better yet:
the devious second-in-command who disobeys boss orders . . 
.”

“That's
great!
” Sam agreed, getting with the program. “No game has
different levels
of evil in their enemy AI. Then, what if, eventually, the gamer could actually
convert
enemy lieutenants at some time? Like, make them into double agents?”

“Not a bad idea. Interesting twist. Would it sell?”

“Set up a market test,” Max ordered. “But for now, with revenue where it is, we simply cannot retire that entire series just because one of the units tried to surrender. You don't need me to tell you there's no time. Too much is at stake to back down.”

Nods all around the room. It was decided.

One minute later, Dakota and I woke up back at base.

I don't know what I expected after that. Dakota and I had shared something, something really weird, but the last thing she seemed to want to do was talk about it.

The very next night we got assigned jungle duty in
NAZI HATEFEST: THE JUPITER MISSION
, the story of Hitler as a respawned alien trying to take over the universe. His goal, this time, was to control the outer-rim mining district and put all those hardworking Plutonians in gas-cloud concentration camps.

Yeah, I know,
stupid
premise, but Adolf always sells copies.

So here's how the whole thing works.

As soon as you plug that game into your console, the call goes out to my crew. A mission hits our board, we report to the briefing room, and the uniforms and weapons are in our lockers.

We dress quickly. Those loading screens you get don't last forever. There's usually some chatter now between us . . . what to do later, maybe set up a date, maybe hope that your gamer characters are good-looking cheerleaders or swimsuit models this time. Just empty blabber as the carnage is about to begin.

Then I walk over to the console and put my hand inside the register, and it reads my holo-tat string. That is how it knows my team and where to send us.

Simple enough. Into the portal, through an open door, and out the other side, where we join the fray.

That day I was a Nazi general. York was SS. Mi was a Luftwaffe pilot. Reno mounted up as her tail gunner. Jevo . . . ? Hadn't seen muscle-head since that last town, when he was getting a motocross-tire haircut. He never came back out. But honestly, not a big loss. Jevo was never the quickest circuit on the board. Plus, you know, his diet was questionable.

Dakota's gig was to run a concentration camp, complete with boxcars full of children and wards packed with human experimentation. She didn't really say much, fought halfheartedly, got shot and knocked into a holding pond, drowned quickly, and that was that.

Same thing the next night, when we were dressed up as time-traveling mummy terrorists. And after that, when we had to play the role of satanic dinosaurs armed with exploding pterodactyl launchers. And a day later, when they turned us into great black sharks, which were a lot like the great white ones, only we also had laser guns and torpedo rays and could run across land at the speed of sound.

The missions kept coming. Fight after fight, race after race. Some of them fun, some of them spectacular, and all of them painful. Death begat death. Do you gamers feel much of a twang when we hit you? The same as we feel when you snipe us?

I don't know. I've never played from your side.

We can hear you, though. What you say to each other when you play games together. The crosstalk . . .

“Shoot that Nazi.” “Kill that mummy.” “Oh, no, I'm late for work.”

It's interesting to pick that stuff up. Most of the time it's game-related. Strategy or profanity or threats. Other times we gain an edge. HINT: You might not want to yell into your mic that your buddy is sneaking around behind us, especially when I'm right on the other side of a door with huge bullet holes in it. I heard you too. Now I know where
both
of you are. And I will react. I will counter.

So maybe it was a week, finally, when we were all together again in the main lounge. York and Reno came out of Re-Sim looking a bit more haggard than I remembered. Maybe some of the light scars looked a little deeper, maybe their eyes just said tired. That happened. I could get them a break and figured I would; it had been months since the action had slowed down.

Mi was there, as usual, on my right, just as happy as normal. She seemed to like the time off—not that she wasn't always ready to pick a fight, but these periods of inactivity recharged her a bit more easily than the rest of us.

The food was good. The mood was pretty good too. Whatever the panic had been from our employers before, it seemed to have passed. Dakota was fighting, not great, but we all had off days. Sometimes we sent a gamer back to his checkpoint every single time they handed us a weapon. Other times we stumbled around and barely put up much resistance. Like sports, war can be 90 percent luck and 10 percent is just plain chance.

And that's when I saw her, out of the corner of my eye, walking purposefully toward our table. I could tell before Dakota reached my seat that everything was about to get weird.

She looked at Mi, very directly, and asked—OK, told her— “Mi, give me a minute with Phoenix. Now.”

Mi was startled, but only for a second. Remember, this was a girl who kicked serious butt day in and day out, so the look she returned to Dakota was in no way one of fear. It was more of “OK, I'll
let
you.” As in “Remember that I'm the one doing the allowing here.”

Kind of cute, if you ask me.

It got less cute.

Dakota straddled her chair and stared right in my eyes. Something was eating her, I could see it, and it'd been gnawing away for the better part of that week.

“Phoenix,” she whispered, but good luck keeping this quiet. I could already feel the rest of the team circling.

“I've wanted to talk to you,” I said back, “ever since they returned us from the BlackStar base.”

“Me too,” she continued, “but I didn't know where to begin.”

I waited. You'll run into this as a leader. Sometimes you let people work things out on their own. They don't always need to be told the answers up front. Trust your soldiers to chew their own meat.

Her eyes met mine, and I could almost predict the questions that were stirring in there. I knew they were coming and was positive she was going to hate the answers.

Out on the edge of my vision, I saw York and Reno lean in. Mi didn't. She was moving the other way but keeping a watchful eye on the two of us. Crazy moment, until . . .

Dakota asked simply, “Tell me. Tell me straight. Don't lie. What
am
I?”

I never looked away, even though the answer was going to really hurt. And like I said before, I liked her. Loved her, in fact. Like a brother. Like a sister. Even more deeply, though, because I had shared things with her that very few ever share with anyone: death, pain, survival.

Reliance, conquest, peace.

Trust. More trust.

“What
are
you?” I repeated, hoping she would begin to figure it out for herself.

“Really, Phoenix, am I just a disposable enemy? A kind of highly trained worker for some big industrial gaming company? Why do I have to live
here
, in this complex? I want a real home. Why do I have to fight every day? It makes no sense. Really. None of it adds up. I don't remember making this choice.”

I let her go on. I knew she would.

Her voice had come up a bit, and everyone else in the room was starting to follow along. A lot of it probably sounded pretty familiar to some of them. If they too had begun to wonder what
it
was all about.

“I mean”—she was stumbling a bit as the chain began to form—“I can think. I can feel pain. I need to eat and sleep and have time off. But every other indicator points to me just being another cog in the industry. I'm the enemy. The gamer kills me and blows me up. But I can adapt. I can learn. I can adjust. But then I'm the enemy again. And again . . .”