Gamer Army Read online

  Rogan’s family never sat down to meals like this. And he wasn’t used to someone asking him how he was doing—really stopping and asking him and listening to what he said. “I’m great, Mr. Culum.” He shoveled a spoonful of quinoa into his mouth, chewed a little, and forced a swallow. “Honestly. This is the best. I’m really great.”

  The dinner conversation rolled along like that, relaxed and easy, less like a competition or an interview, and more like fun.

  “Congratulations on advancing another round, Rogan. That’s wonderful.” Rogan’s mother smiled warmly when they were given video conference time two days later. “I’m so happy for you. Your dad’s proud too. He’s in a meeting right now, but you can bet he can’t wait to tell all the programmers and developers about his pro gamer son.”

  “Mom, he can’t tell anyone about the tournament before the reality show goes online. It’s in the contract and everything.”

  She nodded. “He knows that, hon. Don’t worry. The big secret is safe with us. We’re excited. That’s all. When the show is finally on, we’ll have a viewing party and everything.”

  When Rogan first heard about the Laser Viper Final Challenge, he had figured his parents would be interested, but he never thought they’d be this excited about it all. He never expected a party. He frowned. What if he was eliminated after the next round? Then his family would watch the show about the tournament, knowing he had already lost.

  It was as if his mother read his thoughts. “You just focus on doing the best you can. Have fun. You and your dad. Gaming is your life!” She looked down for a moment, and although Rogan couldn’t see her phone off camera, he recognized that slight dulling of her eyes, the distance between what she was thinking about and where she was. Twitter update or text message. She seemed to realize Rogan was waiting. “Sorry. I’m being horrible.” She tapped at her phone. “This is a … Just a second.” Finally she looked up and smiled. “Sorry. Crazy news day. Have you heard—” Her expression froze on screen.

  “Oh, come on,” Rogan said. He wondered how this place could have state-of-the-art gaming equipment, how Atomic Frontiers could build an entire advanced space station, but not be able to get a decent connection for a simple video call.

  “—basically about that.” She sighed. “More connection problems? That’s been a big problem across the—” She froze, mouth open and eyelids lowered in a weird expression. He would have laughed if the situation weren’t so frustrating, if this weren’t the only chance to talk to his mom for who knew how long.

  The video resumed and Rogan asked quickly, before the system could freeze up again, “How’s Wiggles? Does he miss me? Will you give him a treat for me?”

  Mom laughed. “Wiggles is fine. He absolutely misses you. He goes to your bedroom to check for you every night.”

  “Will you pet him so he doesn’t get too lonely?” Rogan asked.

  “I will pet him. And I will make sure he gets plenty of treats.”

  Rogan tried to tell her about the most recent gaming round, about how he and Shaylyn had been gamer rivals for so long, and how he’d totally come out ahead, and how he never thought they’d find the target in the woods and the castle. But the connection kept stalling, and finally they were both ready to give up. They said their goodbyes, and Rogan, discouraged and a little lonely, disconnected early.

  “How was your crappy call home?” Shaylyn asked Rogan when he returned to the commons.

  “Mom might as well have sent me a photograph,” said Rogan.

  “Mine froze up a lot too,” Jackie said. “I asked X about it. He said they were working on the problem.”

  Shaylyn sipped her Orange-a-Tang PowerSlam energy drink. “How does it feel to be the last dude, Ro?”

  Rogan shrugged. “Fine.” He didn’t care who he was up against, boys or girls. But he did care that he basically couldn’t call home.

  His irritation must have showed, because Shay zeroed in on it the way their vipers might establish a target lock. “You don’t look fine. Only guys have been cut from this contest so far. I think you’re worried you’ll be the next one to go home.” The cameras must have picked up on the tension as well because two cambots approached.

  Rogan wanted to appear as if he didn’t care what she said, but the harder he tried to be casual, the more uncomfortable he was sure he looked. “I’m going home only after I win this thing.”

  Shaylyn didn’t appear convinced. She kept up her snarky smile. “So I’ll probably be leaving with Jackie, since she’ll be up against me in the finals after you lose next round.”

  “Can you two please leave me out of this?” Jackie said.

  Rogan would have continued the old adversarial banter, were he not feeling so weird about that messed-up vid call. He flicked his hand like he was brushing away a fly. “Whatever. I’ll be in my room.”

  Jacqueline followed him, catching up to him just before he reached the door. She handed him her hacked VR headset and its cheap gamer gloves, using her body to block anyone or anything that might be watching. “You looked kind of down, like maybe you’d like to get out of here for a while.”

  Rogan watched Jackie, wondering if this was a trick, if she was trying to get him caught with the VR set so he’d be in trouble and maybe kicked out of the contest. But no. They’d spent a lot of time together so far in this tournament and he was starting to get to know her. She was just being cool, being Jackie.

  “Thanks,” he whispered. She was right.

  Minutes later, Rogan was in his bathroom, an ever greater separation from the constant camera presence than his camera-free bedroom. He set out the two small, cheap VR room sensors, slipped on the glasses and gloves, and adjusted the headphones over his ears before turning it on.

  Then … he was on his way to Virtual City.

  Even though heading into digi-space was as routine for him as checking for implant software updates, this time his hands were clammy and his heart pounded. He knew he was really in his private dorm bathroom, but he felt like he was making some daring escape from Atomic Frontiers headquarters. There was an old virtual reality gaming classic called Escape from Alcatraz which, even though it seemed pretty primitive by now, still managed to thrill when you played it, and this was like that times a hundred.

  And yet, for all the excitement of sneaking around, Rogan found himself, seconds later, on the corner of Nintendo Avenue and 834th Street on a regular day in Virtual City.

  Normal traffic rolled by. A Ford Model T. A Back to the Future DeLorean. A car shaped like a big unicorn with wheels where its hooves should be. The usual thing. He took in a deep breath, and somehow he could smell a difference in the air, even though he knew that should be impossible.

  “It’s good to be home,” he said, and started the long walk toward his apartment. The room sensors that came with this crappy VR set barely worked and didn’t pick up his in-place walking very well, so his movement felt a little like one of those terrible dreams in which he was trying to run but his legs wouldn’t function. He thought about hailing a cab, but then figured it’d be best to avoid spending any game credits, just in case Atomic Frontiers could somehow track the transaction to figure out he’d been to Virtual City. After all, they owned a lot of the taxis here.

  It didn’t matter. It was simply great to be back in his other hometown. His legal residence of record may have been in Seattle, but he felt far more comfortable here in Virtual City than down near Pike Place Market or over by the Space Needle. Virtual City had a Space Needle that was so big, it literally reached up to space.

  But after he’d walked several blocks, he started to notice something was not quite right. Ad screens were common all over the city, like Times Square in New York, except the whole town was like that. But instead of the usual ads targeting each individual user’s interests and online search patterns, most of the signs were now scrolling information updates about the disturbances. Technical difficulties expected to subside soon. Aberrations are a minor temporary fault
that will soon be corrected. All interrupted transactions will be refunded.

  A few more blocks down the street, a massive protest was well on its way to becoming a riot. People of all kinds—Russians, Chinese, Canadians, vampires, knights in armor, superheroes—were all throwing a fit, demanding the system be repaired.

  “I was planning on proposing to my girlfriend!” one man shouted. “Then the restaurant we were in digi-scrambled and her whole account was deleted. No reason. I’ve never met her in the real world. I don’t know how to find her!”

  A tall woman-giraffe hybrid towered above the others, complaining about her critically important investor meeting that had been interrupted. “It’s hard enough to line up people to attend in the first place. When everyone in the building freezes until people log out, they don’t usually come back!”

  “This is the end!” A man with a long beard and flowing robes held up a wooden staff and shouted in a vain effort to get people’s attention. “For it was foretold in the second chapter of the Book of Digitization: ‘And lo, these shall be signs unto you, of the coming compocalypse. Accounts shall freeze and avatars shall be deleted. And in the digital city, neighbor shall turn against neighbor, even as the fabric of their digital existence crumbles around them. And no backup of your data shall save you! No software patch will redeem you. Behold, the end times.…’ ”

  “What’s going on here?” Rogan asked an orange-skinned lizard man.

  The lizard man flicked his tongue. “Oi! Where you been, mate?”

  “That’s hard to explain,” Rogan said.

  A man in a business suit and dark sunglasses rushed up to him. “Rogan Webber, I don’t think you want to be here right now. You need to get back to the dorms.”

  Rogan took a step back. “What? How do you know where I am IRL?”

  “I don’t have time to explain. Log out of digi-space and get back to the dorm.” The man took another step closer to him. “Now.”

  It wasn’t super weird for someone in Virtual City to know his name. After all, the name floated around above him in his bio-bubble for everyone to see. But some stranger in Virtual City knowing where he was in the real world was scary, and for a long moment Rogan froze in terrified indecision.

  “Log out NOW!” the man shouted.

  Rogan yanked off the headset and held down the power button to force a hard logout. He sat on the edge of the bathtub, squeezing his Zelda shield pendant and trying to catch his breath. It was the first time he could remember feeling more comfortable in real life than logged in to digi-space.

  But there have been protests before,” Jackie whispered at the table the next day after Rogan had huddled them all together to return the VR set to Jackie and tell them what had happened. “Riots and stuff.”

  “But that’s not the weird part,” Rogan said. “How did that guy know”—he glanced up at the cameras—“What he knew?”

  “Maybe he didn’t,” Shay said. “There are a lot of crazies. He wasn’t, like, totally specific.”

  They let the conversation drop and were happily surprised about half an hour later, when X came to take them to their next round of gaming.

  “We’re already starting the next round?” Jackie said. “That’s fast.”

  “I’m not complaining,” Shaylyn said.

  “Let’s do this,” Rogan said, leading the way in pursuit of X toward the arena.

  After the usual enthusiastic greeting from Sophia and Mr. Culum and a quick briefing, the three remaining gamers launched right into their next round of Laser Viper, this time, weirdly, without a combat drop from the SR-73 StarScreamer.

  In moments they stood next to the Thames River in a game-simulated London at midnight. The square, castle-like buildings of Tower Bridge were lit up nearby over the river, and the ninety-five-floor skyscraper the Shard reached for the sky upstream. The three of them stood outside the walls of the fortress known as the Tower of London.

  It wasn’t much of a tower. They’d been shown a hologram of the entire fortress before starting this round of the game. The low castle structure had double walls laid out in a square that looked a little pinched together on the north side. A lot of different buildings were situated directly inside the inner wall, but the section that really stood out was the square White Tower in the center, three or four stories tall, with small towers in each corner.

  Their objective was in a secret British military research base, the entrance to which was located under the White Tower. The best British military technology was developed there, including the device the three vipers were supposed to steal before Scorpion infiltrators got their hands on it. Rogan thought the scenario of Scorpion operatives infiltrating a foreign security force in order to steal an important piece of technology was getting old, but he supposed what Mr. Culum said was true. His engineers were doing all they could to get the incredibly detailed games programmed in time for each contest round and didn’t have time to worry too much about the story.

  The amazing device the vipers were supposed to rescue this time was the Velox Mercury X. It was the size and shape of a gallon paint can, but with a metal X fused to the top where a can’s lid would be. It was capable of transmitting almost a thousand terabytes per second, enough for every digital TV show and movie on every Netflix cloud server in less than one minute. If Scorpion stole the Velox Mercury X before the laser vipers secured it, they could use it to hack computer systems and spread a devastating computer virus over a widespread area.

  The three gamers were in an arena, wearing suits that put them in a simulated environment disguised as advanced fighter robots who were disguised as people. Rogan had to take a moment to run through it all in his head to get it straight. The Polyadaptive Nanotech Cloak, powered by the Tian Li, generated perfect alter identities for each of them. Bio-bubbles showed up on each viper’s HUD to help the gamers spot one another. Anyone else would see Rogan as the uniformed Lieutenant Ericson, a twenty-four-year-old communications technician assigned to the base, Shaylyn as stocky Staff Sergeant Benton, in charge of the base’s armory, and Jacqueline as water treatment specialist Corporal Carson, a compact man with flecks of white in his hair and wrinkles around the eyes.

  “Problem number one,” Shay said in Sergeant Benton’s deep voice. “This is just weird for me looking and sounding like some guy. You know what I mean? It’s going to take some getting used to. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “What’s the big deal? Just stay away from the beautiful women NPCs, and you’ll be fine,” Rogan said.

  “Like this old guy could get a woman to notice him,” Shay added. “Problem two. How are we supposed to get in there?”

  Bright spotlights beamed on every inch of the fortress. “The place is lit brighter than the sun.”

  “Problem number three,” said the man who was really Jackie. “In real life, London has about half a million surveillance cameras watching everybody everywhere. If they’ve set the game up like that, we might have a real challenge sneaking over the wall undetected.”

  Rogan watched the fortress. “If we move fast enough, maybe it won’t matter if—”

  “That’s, like, your plan for everything, right?” Sergeant Benton spoke in a man’s voice, but still sounded like Shay. “Charge in as fast as possible? Try to be the first one to reach the—”

  “Just because you’re always behind, always blown up in the first half of the—”

  “Stop it!” Jackie grabbed the others by the arm and pulled them closer to her to get their attention. “Arguing won’t get us anywhere. We are a team or we fail.” She let go of their arms and spoke more quietly as a group of enthusiastic partiers passed them. “Farther down the path, there’s more tree cover. It’s not going to completely hide us, but it might be the best we can do.”

  “Should we go invisible?” Rogan asked.

  “No way. Someone will see us disappear out here or reappear in there,” Shaylyn said.

  Jackie shook her head. “It’s risky, but I think we s
hould do it. Movement draws attention. It’s why people wave. If we’re standing still out here and blink out of sight, they might not notice. But three grown men leaping over that giant wall is more than enough movement to make people see us.”

  Rogan held out his hands, palms up to Shay as if to say, See, I told you so.

  They started exploring and finally passed a big gatehouse, which stuck out from the rest of the wall much closer to the public walkway. It had round towers in the corner, one of which must have enjoyed a lot of shade in daylight hours from the nearby tree branch.

  “There,” Jackie said. “We go invisible, then rocket-jump up onto that tower. One more leap over the inner wall should get us inside.”

  They watched the walkway, waiting until they couldn’t see anyone around. Then they flipped through their HUD menus to adjust their PNCs, and vanished. Their human disguises were replaced by only the faint wire-frame outline of their laser viper attack robots. “Well, Flyer,” said Rogan quietly. Once in invisibility mode their communication was internal only, silent to anyone but the vipers. “You wanted action. Here we go. You want to fly ahead and scout the area for us, warn us if anyone’s coming?”

  The outline of her body gave a thumbs-up. “You got it.” And she was gone, up over the wall, and out of sight. “I have a heat signature on a security guard way down at the other end of the castle. Another couple up on a roof. But nobody right around here.”

  “In real life, these would be the guards assigned to protect the crown jewels,” said Engineer. “So let’s not be thinking they’re like average mall cops. Plus, they said our PNCs draw too much power, so our weapons won’t work with our disguises active. Hold back and wait for us.”

  Rogan rocket-jumped up to the tower on the gatehouse, grabbing the parapet at the edge and hoisting himself up effortlessly. Engineer joined him a moment later. “OK,” Rogan said. “It’s a lot farther to the inside when you’re up here in person than when looking at a map.” Engineer didn’t wait for him but moved across the roof, walking carefully, not running, probably to keep the noise down. She led the way, climbing up atop a small square tower in the opposite corner and from there leaping to a big, round building on the inner wall and then down to the ground. Ranger and Flyer joined her.