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When Jimmy opened the rear door and walked back into the Full Metal office space, he was holding the thumb drive in a death grip with his left hand. The pistol was tucked into his pants behind his back, and the HK was slung over his right shoulder. There was no one on the floor. Jimmy stepped out of the short hall and turned left, passed two offices, and came to the doorway of the server room. As he stepped to the threshold the noise of the saw ceased.

The walls of the room were lined with tall server racks. Red Jacket was there, to the far right, aiming his pistol at Jimmy. Next to him was the driver of the van. The spiky-haired Russian was pulling the wet saw from the floor, where he had cut a two-foot square block. The metal legs Jimmy had seen poking out of one of the bags earlier belonged to a tripod, positioned above the block. From the tripod’s top, a chain hoist descended, hooked to a bracket anchored in the block’s center. Spiky Hair set the saw down, removed a pair of safety goggles, and stared at Jimmy with small, close-set eyes.

Standing directly in front of Jimmy was the leader. He was dressed sharply, in a dark gray suit with a blue button-up. His left hand was on Kim’s shoulder, and with his right he held a gun to her head, the same gun he had used to kill the security guard who was lying at his feet, head propped against the bottom row of server blades. The leader’s eyes were cold, soulless. He looked down at Jimmy’s scrawny bare chest and smirked.

Kim looked scared out of her mind, not that anyone could blame her. Her dark eyes were wide and glistening in the overhead lights, and the entirety of her five-foot three-inch frame was shaking, from her brown hair to her pink, laceless sneakers. She wore a T-shirt and sweats, clothes obviously thrown on hastily to come and retrieve Jimmy.

“Good choice,” Husky Voice said. He nodded at the driver, who started to approach, then stopped as Jimmy revealed the torch lighter he had been concealing in his right hand, the one he had taken from Smoker on the way back up. He ignited it and held it just below the thumb drive in his outstretched left hand.

“This is important to you, right? I’m guessing it has some kind of decryption, for whatever it is you’re going after down below.”

Husky Voice smiled, revealing a row of uneven teeth. “Exciting new technology. Lots of security measures down there. Easier to get through this way.” He nodded toward the tripod and block. “North Koreans will pay handsomely.”

I was right about the thumb drive. Thank God.

“It’s brave, what you’re doing,” Husky Voice continued. “But not very bright. By the time you heat up the drive enough to cause damage, I will put a bullet through your head…” He nodded toward Kim. “And hers.”

Kim made an almost-squealing noise low in her throat. Jimmy swallowed. “I know,” he said. “I just needed an excuse to have the lighter out.”
Now!
He tossed the thumb drive high into the air, where it hit the far wall and fell behind a rack of servers.

All eyes had followed it, except for Kim’s. She took advantage of the situation to knock the leader’s hand away and run for the door. Jimmy grabbed onto the top of the nearest server rack, pulled himself up, and held the lighter beneath the ceiling sprinkler. For the first agonizing seconds nothing happened. Then a recorded voice, female, issued: “Warning: fire detected. Suppression system will activate in ten seconds…”

Jimmy dropped behind the rack and grabbed the door handle. “Please exit the room immediately,” the voice continued. As Jimmy pedaled backward, pulling the door closed, he heard a sound like a small, keening insect and felt a sharp impact to the upper left side of his forehead. He slammed the door closed…

And was now standing on the other side, on the main floor. The world was spinning beneath him. He could hear Kim sobbing somewhere in the open space behind him. Sidestepping toward the wall, he pulled the HK from his shoulder. The door handle jostled but did not open. Right about now Husky Voice would be going for the key card…

Jimmy pointed the HK at the badge reader next to the door as three bullets tore through it from the other side and into the floor space. Kim yelped. He risked a quick glance over his shoulder and saw that she was unhurt, huddling somewhere out of sight behind the cubicles. Jimmy unloaded a burst into the badge reader. From the other side of the door he heard a whooshing sound. That would be the fire-suppression system engaging. Jimmy’s dad had explained gaseous fire-suppression systems to him once—the kind used in server rooms, where water would cause damage to the electrical equipment. The gas being released into the server room now would push most of the oxygen out of the space, and the mercs inside would soon pass out.

The world teetered. Jimmy’s head was swimming and darkness crept in. The voices on the other side of the door became frantic. There was coughing and shouting, but Jimmy thought the Russians would live. The fire department would get the alarm and be on their way shortly.

They’ll live. Kim will live. But things aren’t looking so good for me,
he thought as the floor rushed up to meet him.

Jimmy awoke to bright lights, in a reclining chair. The circular room was a nest of holo-monitors and multi-touch interface stations.
Where the hell…?
He attempted to draw his left hand up to feel his injured head and found that he was unable to move it. Same with the right.

“The restraints are for your own safety,” a thin, bald man in a white coat said as he leaned over Jimmy and began fiddling with the straps. Standing a few feet away from the chair was a man in military uniform…A Faction uniform. From…the game?

No, not a game. Slowly, memories returned. At first it was difficult to sort what was real from what he had just experienced, like the confusion that lingers after waking up in the middle of a dream. The thin man removed the arm restraints, then he reached up and took something off Jimmy’s head—a relatively simple-looking device with a few connection points. A single word on one side of it read
TECHNICOM
.

Jimmy lifted his right hand and felt his shaved head. No blood. No injury. The man in the military uniform was eyeing Jimmy, his expression unreadable.

The simulation. Before joining a Faction, all soldiers went through a simulation…to determine what camp they would fall into: Peacekeepers or Enforcers. It was all coming back to him now. Jimmy marveled at the direct neural interface technology, but he was most impressed with how it melded reality and his own subconscious. The Factions and subordinate Peacekeeper/Enforcer groups were reflected in the “game”:
RECOIL!
TechniCom itself was integrated into the scenario as a kind of plot device. Even his girlfriend, Kim, was used to raise the stakes. On the subconscious side, Jimmy’s fascination with the early years of the twenty-first century and his love of video games were baked into the simulation. Much of it even mirrored his favorite ’80s action movie. It was all pretty amazing. However…

“I failed,” he said.

“What’s that, son?”

The officer approached as the thin man walked away. “I failed,” Jimmy repeated. “I died.”

The older man inclined his head. “The simulation is designed to push you to your limits; to approximate a test subject with zero military training and gauge response to violence and the threat of death, the ability to overcome fear. You saved your girlfriend’s life. You demonstrated tactical aptitude, courage, and clear thinking under extreme duress. You proved capable of using deadly force and knowing when to do so, but, most important of all, you
felt
something when you pulled the trigger…something more than just the recoil.”

The officer held out his hand. “Congratulations, son. And welcome to the Peacekeepers.”

Micky Neilson is the lead writer in publishing at Blizzard Entertainment, where he has worked since 1993. Neilson’s game-writing credits include
World of Warcraft
,
StarCraft
,
Warcraft III
, and
Lost Vikings 2
. Micky’s first comic book,
World of Warcraft: Ashbringer
, hit number two on the
New York Times
bestseller list for hardcover graphic books, and
World of Warcraft: Pearl of Pandaria
reached number three. In 2014, his Diablo III novella,
Morbed
, was published, as well as his long-awaited novella
Blood of the Highborne
. With the support of his wife, Tiffany, and daughter, Tatiana, Neilson looks forward to continuing his writing adventures for years to come.

Anda didn’t really start to play the game until she got herself a girl-shaped avatar. She was twelve, and up until then, she’d played a boy elf because her parents had sternly warned her that if you played a girl, you were an instant perv magnet. None of the girls at Ada Lovelace Comprehensive would have been caught dead playing a girl character. In fact, the only girls she’d ever seen in-game were being played by boys. You could tell, ’cause they were shaped like a boy’s idea of what a girl looked like: hooge buzwabs and long legs all barely contained in tiny, pointless, leather bikini armor. Bintware, she called it.

But when Anda was twelve, she met Liza the Organiza, whose avatar was female but had sensible tits and sensible armor and a bloody great sword that she was clearly very good with. Liza came to school after PE, when Anda was sitting and massaging her abused podge and hating her entire life from stupid sunrise to rotten sunset. Her PE uniform was at the bottom of her schoolbag and her face was that stupid red color that she
hated
and now it was stinking maths, which was hardly better than PE but at least she didn’t have to sweat.

But instead of maths, all the girls were called to assembly, and Liza the Organiza stood on the stage in front of Miss Cruickshanks, the principal, and Mrs. Danzig, the useless counselor.

“Hullo, chickens,” Liza said. She had an Australian accent. “Well, aren’t you lot just precious and bright and expectant with your pink upturned faces like a load of flowers staring up at the sky? Warms me fecking heart, it does.”

That made her laugh, and she wasn’t the only one. Miss Cruickshanks and Mrs. Danzig didn’t look amused, but they tried to hide it.

“I am Liza the Organiza, and I kick arse. Seriously.” She tapped a key on her laptop and the screen behind her lit up. It was a game—not the one that Anda played, but something space themed, a space station with a rocket ship in the background. “This is my avatar.” Sensible boobs, sensible armor, and a sword the size of the world. “In-game, they call me the Lizanator, Queen of the Spacelanes, El Presidente of the Clan Fahrenheit.” The Fahrenheits had chapters in every game. They were amazing and deadly and cool, and to her knowledge, Anda had never met one in the flesh. They had their own
island
in her game. Crikey.

On-screen, the Lizanator was fighting an army of wookie-men, sword in one hand, laser blaster in the other, rocket jumping, spinning, strafing, making impossible kills and long shots, diving for power-ups and ruthlessly running her enemies to ground.

“The
whole
Clan Fahrenheit. I won that title through popular election, but they voted me in ’cause of my prowess in
combat
. I’m a world champion in six different games, from first-person shooters to strategy games. I’ve commanded armies and I’ve sent armies to their respawn gates by the thousands. Thousands, chickens: my battle record is 3,522 kills in a single battle. I have taken home cash prizes from competitions totalling more than four hundred thousand pounds. I game for four to six hours nearly every day, and the rest of the time, I do what I like.

“One of the things I like to do is come to girls’ schools like yours and let you in on a secret: girls kick arse. We’re faster, smarter, and better than boys. We play harder. We spend too much time thinking that we’re freaks for gaming, and when we do game, we never play as girls because we catch so much shite for it. Time to turn that around. I am the best gamer in the world and I’m a girl. I started playing at ten, and there were no women in games—you couldn’t even buy a game in any of the shops I went to. It’s different now, but it’s still not perfect. We’re going to change that, chickens, you lot and me.

“How many of you game?”

Anda put her hand up. So did about half the girls in the room.

“And how many of you play girls?”

All the hands went down.

“See, that’s a tragedy. Practically makes me weep. Gamespace smells like a boy’s
armpit
. It’s time we girled it up a little. So here’s my offer to you: if you will play as a girl, you will be given probationary memberships in the Clan Fahrenheit, and if you measure up, in six months, you’ll be full-fledged members.”

In real life, Liza the Organiza was a little podgy, like Anda herself, but she wore it with confidence. She was solid, like a brick wall, her hair bobbed bluntly at her shoulders. She dressed in a black jumper over loose dungarees, with giant goth boots with steel toes that looked like something you’d see in an in-game shop, though Anda was pretty sure they’d come from a real-world goth shop in Camden Town.

She stomped her boots, one-two
, thump-thump
, like thunder on the stage. “Who’s in, chickens? Who wants to be a girl out-game and in?”

Anda jumped to her feet. A Fahrenheit, with her own island! Her head was so full of it that she didn’t notice that she was the only one standing. The other girls stared at her, a few giggling and whispering.

“That’s all right, love,” Liza called, “I like enthusiasm. Don’t let those staring faces rattle yer: they’re just flowers turning to look at the sky. Pink-scrubbed, shining, expectant faces. They’re looking at you because
you
had the sense to get to your feet when opportunity came—and that means that someday, girl, you are going to be a leader of women, and men, and you will kick arse. Welcome to the Clan Fahrenheit.”

She began to clap, and the other girls clapped, too, and even though Anda’s face was the color of a lollipop lady’s sign, she felt like she might burst with pride and good feeling, and she smiled until her face hurt.

> Anda

her sergeant said to her,

> how would you like to make some money?

> Money, Sarge?

Ever since she’d risen to platoon leader, she’d been getting more missions, but they paid
gold
—money wasn’t really something you talked about in-game.

The Sarge—sensible boobs, gigantic sword, longbow, gloriously orcish ugly phiz—moved her avatar impatiently.

> Something wrong with my typing, Anda?

> No, Sarge

she typed.

> You mean gold?

> If I meant gold, I would have said gold. Can you go voice?

Anda looked around. Her door was shut and she could hear her parents in the sitting room watching something loud on telly. She turned up her music just to be safe and then slipped on her headset. They said it could noise-cancel a Black Hawk helicopter—it had better be able to overcome the little inductive speakers suction-cupped to the underside of her desk. She switched to voice.

“Hey, Lucy,” she said.

“Call me Sarge!” Lucy’s accent was American, like an old TV show, and she lived somewhere in the middle of the country where it was all vowels, Iowa or Ohio. She was Anda’s best friend in-game but she was so hard-core, it was boring sometimes.

“Hi, Sarge,” she said, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice. She’d never smart off to a superior in-game, but v2v it was harder to remember to keep to the game norms.

“I have a mission that pays real cash. Whichever PayPal you’re using, they’ll deposit money into it. Looks fun, too.”

“That’s a bit weird, Sarge. Is that against Clan rules?” There were a lot of Clan rules about what kind of mission you could accept, and they were always changing. There were curb crawlers in gamespace, and the way that the Clan leadership kept all the mummies and daddies from going ape-poo about it was by enforcing a long, boring code of conduct that was meant to ensure that none of the Fahrenheit girlies ended up being virtual prozzies for hairy old men in raincoats on the other side of the world.

“What?” Anda loved how Lucy quacked
What?
It sounded especially American. She had to force herself from parroting it back. “No, geez. All the executives in the Clan pay the rent doing missions for money. Some of them are even rich from it, I hear! You can make a lot of money gaming, you know.”

“Is it really true?” She’d heard about this but she’d assumed it was just stories, like the kids who gamed so much that they couldn’t tell reality from fantasy. Or the ones who gamed so much that they stopped eating and got all anorexic. She wouldn’t mind getting a little anorexic, to be honest. Bloody podge.

“Yup! And this is our chance to get in on the ground floor. Are you in?”

“It’s not—you know,
pervy
, is it?”

“Gag me. No. Geez, Anda! Are you nuts? No—they want us to go kill some guys.”

“Oh, we’re good at that!”

The mission took them far from Fahrenheit Island, to a cottage on the far side of the largest continent on the game world, which was called Dandelionwine. The travel was tedious, and twice they were ambushed on the trail, something that had hardly happened to Anda since she joined the Fahrenheits: attacking a Fahrenheit was bad for your health, because even if you won the battle, they’d bring a war to you.

But now they were far from the Fahrenheits’ power base, and two different packs of brigands waylaid them on the road. Lucy spotted the first group before they got into sword range and killed four of the six with her bow before they closed for hand-to-hand. Anda’s sword—gigantic and fast—was out then, and her fingers danced over the keyboard as she fought off the player who was attacking her, her body jerking from side to side as she hammered on the multibutton controller beside her. She won—of course! She was a Fahrenheit! Lucy had already slaughtered her attacker. They desultorily searched the bodies and came up with some gold and a couple of scrolls, but nothing to write home about. Even the gold didn’t seem like much, given the cash waiting at the end of the mission.

The second group of brigands was even less daunting, though there were twenty of them. They were total noobs, and fought like statues. They’d clearly clubbed together to protect themselves from harder players, but they were no match for Anda and Lucy. One of them even begged for his life before she ran him through:

> please sorry u cn have my gold sorry!!!11!

Anda laughed and sent him to the respawn gate.

> You’re a nasty person, Anda

Lucy typed.

> I’m a Fahrenheit!!!!!­!!!!!­

she typed back.

The brigands on the road were punters, but the cottage that was their target was guarded by an altogether more sophisticated sort. They were spotted by sentries long before they got within sight of the cottage, and they saw the warning spell travel up from the sentries’ hilltop like a puff of smoke, speeding away toward the cottage. Anda raced up the hill while Lucy covered her with her bow, but that didn’t stop the sentries from subjecting Anda to a hail of flaming spears from their fortified position. Anda set up her standard dodge-and-weave pattern, assuming that the sentries were non-player characters—who wanted to
pay
to sit around in gamespace watching a boring road all day?—and to her surprise, the spears followed her. She took one in the chest and only some fast work with her shield and all her healing scrolls saved her. As it was, her constitution was knocked down by half and she had to retreat back down the hillside.

“Get down,” Lucy said in her headset. “I’m gonna use the BFG.”

Every game had one—the Big Friendly Gun, the generic term for the baddest-arse weapon in the world. Lucy had rented this one from the Clan armory for a small fortune in gold and Anda had laughed and called her paranoid, but now Anda helped Lucy set it up and thanked the game gods for her foresight. It was a huge, demented flaming crossbow that fired five-meter bolts that exploded on impact. It was a beast to arm and a beast to aim, but they had a nice, dug-in position of their own at the bottom of the hill and it was there that they got the BFG set up, deployed, armed, and ranged.

“Fire!” Lucy called, and the game did this amazing and cool animation that it rewarded you with whenever you loosed a bolt from the BFG, making the gamelight dim toward the sizzling bolt as though it were sucking the illumination out of the world as it arced up the hillside, trailing a comet tail of sparks. The game played them a groan of dismay from their enemies, and then the bolt hit home with a crash that made her point of view vibrate like an earthquake. The roar in her headphones was deafening, and behind it she could hear Lucy on the voice chat, cheering it on.

“Nuke ’em till they glow and shoot ’em in the dark! Yee-haw!” Lucy called, and Anda laughed and pounded her fist on the desk. Gobbets of former enemy sailed over the tree line dramatically, dripping hyper-red blood and ichor.

In her bedroom, Anda caressed the controller pad, and her avatar punched the air and did a little rugby victory dance that the All Blacks had released as a limited-edition promo after they won the World Cup.

Now they had to move fast, for their enemies at the cottage would be alerted to their presence and waiting for them. They spread out into a wide flanking maneuver around the cottage’s sides, staying just outside of bow range, using scrying scrolls to magnify the cottage and make the foliage around them fade to translucency.

There were four guards around the cottage, two with nocked arrows and two with whirling slings. One had a scroll out and was surrounded by the concentration marks that indicated spell casting.

“Go, go, go!”
Lucy called.

Anda went! She had two scrolls left in her inventory, and one was a shield spell. They cost a fortune and burned out fast, but whatever that guard was cooking up, it had to be bad news. She cast the spell as she charged for the cottage, and lucky thing, because there was a fifth guard up a tree who dumped a pot of boiling oil on her that would have cooked her down to her bones in ten seconds if not for the spell.

She power-climbed the tree and nearly lost her grip when whatever the nasty spell was bounced off her shield. She reached the fifth man as he was trying to draw his dirk and dagger, and lopped his bloody head off in one motion, then backflipped off the high branch, trusting to her shield to stay intact for her impact on the cottage roof.

The strategy worked—now she had the drop (literally!) on the remaining guards, having successfully taken the high ground. In her headphones, the sound of Lucy making mayhem, the grunts as she pounded her keyboard mingling with the in-game shrieks when her arrows found homes in the chests of two more guards.