Gamer Army Read online

  Back in the dorms the energy was the highest it had been since Jacqueline left. Rogan and Shay had the service bots roll in with some PowerSlam, and they talked and laughed in amazement about the training round.

  “Culum’s a weird guy, but he’s right,” Shay said. “This technology is going to change everything. Everyone will be lining up to get the implants if it means they can do what we did today. We weren’t people in game suits controlling characters in a game, we were people in a game.”

  Rogan flopped down on the couch. “That’s the weird thing.”

  “What?”

  “Well, that all of us in this tournament have implants.” He looked up at her. “I thought we were here because we’re the best, because we’d earned our chance. Not because of stupid devices in our brains.”

  “It’s not like that,” Shay said. “We are top-ranked gamers in our age group. It’s just that the brain implants are required for this new system. Of course he needed people who were both great gamers and who, like, also have the hardware.”

  “Then why not tell us all that right away?” Rogan said. “Too much—” He stopped himself as a cambot approached. He pulled Shay down to hide by the couch and whispered, “Too much weird stuff is going on.”

  “Takashi’s voice telling us to clap twice?” Shay whispered back.

  “And the guy coming after me in Virtual City. Knowing who I was and where I was in real life.”

  “And that stuff Takashi was saying about how the game rounds are so weird, completely different from the normal Laser Viper game.”

  “Right. Game levels with more noncombatant NPCs than enemies to fight?” Rogan said.

  “What are you saying?” Shaylyn asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Rogan. “Nothing, I guess. It’s just strange.”

  She stood up and talked out loud with all her old attitude. “Maybe you’re just nervous about the championship.”

  “Maybe.” Rogan was serious. He didn’t know what to think.

  That night Rogan went to his bathroom to brush his teeth, wash his face, and update his implant before bed. Reaching for the update cable, he saw it.

  “Jackie’s hacked VR set,” he whispered. But how did it get in his bathroom? It hadn’t been there earlier that day. Or, if it had, and he’d missed it, he was certain it hadn’t been in there the night before when he ran his updates. Jackie had been gone for a while. Who had brought these in?

  He was shaking now. Before he realized how silly the gesture was, he hid the headset under a hand towel. Then he walked around his room, checked the closet, and even under the bed to see if he was alone.

  Returning to the bathroom, he leaned back against the closed door, breathing heavy, his heart pounding, looking at the towel as though it covered a terrible creature instead of a hacked piece of cheap hardware. Was this a signal from Sophia and Mr. Culum that they knew he’d broken the contest rules and gone to digi-space a while back? But then why didn’t they just tell him about it? Kick him out?

  Maybe they were trying to make him freak to make better reality TV. Maybe the set was a part of the contest, like if the contest were about more than gaming. What if there were puzzles to work out both in digi-space and real life?

  “Or maybe I’m still in digi-space,” Rogan whispered to his reflection in the mirror. He pinched himself and felt the sting. “But that doesn’t tell me anything. I’d feel that if I were still streaming into a simulation through my implant.” He splashed water on his face.

  If he started thinking like this, doubting what was real and what was part of the game, he’d lose his mind.

  “No,” Rogan whispered to his reflection in the mirror. “Jackie took her VR set with her. Unless she left it for me. But then who brought it into the room?”

  For just a moment, he thought about going to ask Shaylyn. That’s when he pulled the towel off the device. He figured if the glasses and gloves were in his room because he was in trouble for using them before, then he might as well use them again. More importantly, whether this was all a form of the contest that took place in real life or if it was a digi-space imitation of real life, there was a good chance Shay was in her own bathroom right now with a VR headset just like this one. Perhaps she had already turned hers on and moved way ahead of him.

  Rogan set up the sensors, slipped on the gloves, put on the headset, and hit the switch to activate the hacked system. Last time he’d used them, he had materialized in Virtual City someplace Jackie must have picked. He expected to arrive there again.

  But instead of pixelating into the flash and glamor of Virtual City, he ended up in a place that more closely resembled the burned-out ruins he and his fellow gamers had trained in when they first arrived at Atomic Frontiers headquarters.

  He stood on a cracked and buckled street in front of stores that had been shot full of bullet holes. And yet, at the end of the block was a beautiful shining skyscraper, undamaged and gleaming in the sun. Across the street was a hobbit hole from The Lord of the Rings and some boxy pixelated wooden bungalow that looked like it had been taken block by block straight out of an old version of Minecraft. One of those flying laser gunships from Terminator flew overhead before an X-wing starfighter soared through and blasted it to fiery rubble.

  This time, there had been no login menu for him to access his own account. Instead a different avatar had been preselected. His pop-up holodisplay told him he was “Boy 8472, Age 12.” A completely generic identity. He didn’t even bother pulling up a picture of it.

  The same chaotic mix continued down the street to the limit of his avatar’s line of sight. This city had suffered lots of battle damage, but in digi-space, new buildings and streets could appear in seconds, so rubble could easily lay next to riches. But that wasn’t the only juxtaposition. As Rogan walked along, he spotted buildings, vehicles, and characters from dozens of different video games, TV shows, and movies.

  That kind of mix could be found in Virtual City too, but that place had limits. Virtual City had become a collection of different neighborhoods, with stone castles in one section, copies of celebrity homes in another, blocks of apartments, super tall buildings grouped elsewhere, and more. And Virtual City had plenty of copyright characters from all corners of human imagination, but the use of those elements cost a lot of money or credits, so most people stuck with basic avatars or those based on self scans.

  By the time two Supermans and Cyborg Mario flew by overhead, Rogan had figured out where he was. “Hackerville,” he said quietly. The hidden, illegal, dark side of digi-space. To access this place, a person had to have mad computer skills or be able to pay someone who did. Someone trying to get in here had to be brave, and it helped to have few, if any, moral reservations. In Hackerville, there were no restrictions on violence, no protection for young people, and certainly nobody cared about copyright. That’s why he’d run past Mega Man blasting a kid and his dog with his Mega Buster, a sniper shooting up a real live Mortal Kombat match on a plaza a few blocks to his right, Donkey Kong throwing barrels at the whip-carrying Simon guy from the Castlevania games.

  It was risky hanging out in Hackerville. Every once in a while, the FBI, Atomic Frontiers’ safety and welfare officers, or other official enforcement agencies raided these places, arresting users who couldn’t effectively mask their sign-on signature and who had illegally copied licensed material or were up to other crimes. A lot of people had ended up with fines, forfeiture of digital property, and long-time bans from digi-space.

  Everyone called the place Hackerville, like it was the only one, but in truth, this illegal VR town had been reborn hundreds of times. Every once in a while the servers running the town were seized by law enforcement or shut down for some other reason. It never took long for the place to be reestablished though, and so police and other hypernet security elements spent less time trying to shut down Hackerville, focusing instead on sending in undercover agents to catch more serious law and user agreement breakers.

  A shiv
er rolled through Rogan at the thought of being banned from video games and Virtual City, being confined to real life, worse than jail.

  “Ex-ter-min-ate!” A blue-green laser beam crossed in front of him. Another behind. Six Dalek avatars straight out of Doctor Who rolled into his area, blasting everything and everyone. Rogan’s first instinct was to light up the shooters with CHELs, but he remembered that Boy 8472 didn’t have Ranger’s weapons. Unlike safe Virtual City, Hackerville had weird, often unpredictable combat rules. When avatars were destroyed, sometimes they respawned at their origin points and sometimes they were completely erased. Like everyone else, he ran in a panic.

  Rogan rushed around a corner, sprinted across the street, and leapt up onto the hood of a burning Halo Warthog fighting vehicle. He missed the superior gameplay of the arena, where he would have rolled over this vehicle to clear it faster. With this cheap, hacked VR set, all he could do was run and jump. So 8-bit.

  Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft carried a plasma rifle, running toward the Daleks beside a classic Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator, the flesh on half its face having been ripped away. The Terminator avatar carried a phaser rifle from Star Trek, unleashing a red-hot phaser beam toward the Dalek force.

  Lara Croft shot at a Dalek. “Remember, there’s a creature inside!”

  “Aim for the eye stalks,” the Terminator said in Schwarzenegger’s heavy accent. “It’s the Daleks’ most vulnerable point.”

  Rogan left the battle far behind him. He hated running away, but he had no chance unarmed against that kind of firepower. Looking at the chaos of fleeing people all around him, it was clear that everyone else was thinking pretty much the same thing.

  Except a hooded man in the ragged dark robes who’d followed his every move, every turn, for four blocks now. The man was fast and carried a pair of silver handguns just like Agent 47 from the Hitman games.

  Rogan turned on the speed, sweating so much as he ran in place in the real world that he wanted to slip his glasses off and wipe his face.

  He didn’t dare take the time out. He had no idea who his pursuer was. Some random punk trying to act like a tough assassin? Or was this the next stage of the Laser Viper Final Challenge, a strange test to see how the finalists reacted to combat when they were unarmed? Was it a totally different phenomenon that he didn’t understand? Whatever was happening, whoever was after him, he’d beat it.

  “Ego sum maximus,” Rogan whispered as he jumped to grab the bottom rung of a fire escape ladder on the side of an old, two-story brick building.

  The man was at least a block behind him. “Stop!” he shouted. A gunshot echoed down the street.

  Rogan continued his scramble up the metal ladder, across a steel landing, and up another ladder. A bullet ricocheted off the bricks six feet from him.

  “This guy is a seriously terrible shot,” Rogan muttered to himself, reaching the top of the ladder and vaulting over the little wall onto the flat tarred roof.

  “Come back!” the man shouted from below. “I don’t want to hurt you!”

  “Shooting at me,” Rogan said. “Doesn’t want to hurt me?” It wasn’t that he was afraid of Boy 8472 being shot or even erased. It wasn’t his avatar, and generic characters like this were easily replaced. And he certainly didn’t fear being injured. VR bullets couldn’t hurt him even when he was in his game suit. He just didn’t want to be killed and taken out of this Easter egg level or whatever it was. He risked a look over the wall at the edge of the roof to spot the Agent 47 wannabe still down in the street.

  Rogan smiled, waved at his would-be attacker, and took off running along the edge of the roof, careful to let his attacker keep him in sight.

  “Rogan, stop!” the man yelled.

  Rogan ran as fast as he could, straight for the end of the building. Again wishing he had the greater precision and control of his game suit or the new NeuroCon system, he jumped up on the wall at the edge and launched himself for all he was worth. In the arena or wired in with the NeuroCon system, the impact on top of the next building would have been a lot to deal with. All Rogan did was finish a jump on the cool tiled floor of his bathroom.

  Finishing the jump to the next building was as far as he would flee. He ran a few more paces on the next building for show, drifting to his right, away from the street and out of his attacker’s sight. Then he doubled back and dropped to a low crouch by the wall at the edge of his new building. There he waited.

  And waited.

  After all this, was his attacker quitting?

  A second before Rogan gave up and rose from his hiding place, the man came flying over the alley between buildings, finishing his jump right in front of Rogan. In the next instant Rogan was on him. A noob would just punch the guy, but Rogan knew better and went straight for the enemy’s guns. It worked. He took his pursuer completely by surprise, knocking the guns away before jackhammering him in the gut with a fast series of four hard, low punches. When the cloaked figure bent over from the assault, Rogan threw his whole body into a vicious uppercut.

  Ro’s attacker flew away before slamming down on his back. In an instant, Rogan gathered and aimed both of the guns. “Prepare to respawn, digi-turd.”

  “Rogan, relax. It’s me.” The man sighed and pulled down his hood.

  It was Beckett Ewell.

  Rogan fought the reflex to pull the trigger and shoot his round-one nemesis right there. “That’s not helping you,” Rogan said. “What’s going on?”

  “You have to come with me.”

  Rogan shook the guns a little. “You’re running out of time, Beckett. Or whoever you are.”

  “No, you’re running out of time,” Beckett said. “You have no idea how much danger you’re in.”

  Rogan wished Beckett could see him roll his eyes. “Oh, why? Because I’m sneaking onto a VR set in the dorms? Because I’m in Hackerville?”

  Another voice came from behind him. “I left my VR set for you, Ro.”

  Rogan stepped back from his captive, spreading his arms to keep a gun trained on Beckett while he also aimed at the newcomer. Jackie. She must have found another way onto this roof. Takashi was right behind her.

  What was happening? “Who are you people? What have you done with my friends? Someone better start explaining, or I’m going to start shooting,” Rogan said.

  “I didn’t have my guns drawn to shoot you, man,” Beckett said. “I was trying to keep you safe in that firefight back there. I was trying to stop you so I could talk to you.”

  “Why? Who are you?” Rogan said.

  “We are exactly who we appear to be,” Takashi said. Before Rogan could ask for proof, Takashi continued. “Remember right before I left the dorms I whispered to you that something was weird about the games? You know there is no way the cameras picked that up. No way anyone could impersonate me and tell you that.”

  Beckett kept his empty hands raised and began rising to his feet. “Right after we first met, when we left the airport in that SUV, I made you climb over me in the back seat instead of moving over to make room for you. Remember? No cameras for that. You have to believe us. I know you hate me, but you gotta listen to us. We’re telling the truth.”

  “Truth about what?” Rogan demanded.

  “The truth about Atomic Frontiers and the so-called games,” Jackie said. “And we have to tell you fast, Rogan, because there’s a chance Culum can detect your presence here. The longer you’re here, the greater your risk of being caught.”

  “The game is real, Rogan,” Beckett said. “When we were running around in game suits, we weren’t playing a video game, but operating laser viper combat robots in real life.”

  “That fancy mind-streaming NeuroCon system doesn’t put you in a game. It puts you in a robot. Somewhere in the world. That’s why Culum had us steal the Velox Mercury X transmitter. He needed that high-capacity data transmission capability to more fully sync you in real time with your robot body.”

  “How do I know this isn’t just part of the cham
pionship round? Like, both Shay and I are facing really good copies of all of you, or maybe Culum’s got you three playing these parts as a consolation prize?” Rogan ran his fingers through his real-life hair, almost pulling his VR headset off. This was maddening. “What if I’ve been in one long NeuroCon simulation, living inside an ongoing video game ever since they connected my implant to that machine?” He was speaking to no one in particular now, his mind whirling with world-inside-game-inside-world possibilities.

  “Rogan, we’ve seen the news,” said Takashi. “The Chinese navy has cranked up tensions over the sinking of their ship. An actual, real-life ship.”

  “There was nonstop coverage of the so-called terrorist attack on that German castle,” said Beckett.

  “Until they broke in with coverage of another terrorist attack on the Tower of London,” Takashi added.

  “You’re just saying that stuff. Doesn’t mean it’s true. I don’t even know if you are really who you appear to be,” Rogan said. But a sharp, cold fear was worming its way through his mind and body. That thing with Beckett in the SUV was true and there was no way anyone else could know about it. This couldn’t be real, could it?

  No. Impossible. But the nonplayer characters in the challenge had been so realistic, the gameplay and objectives so unlike any other games.

  If it had all been real, that meant—Rogan put his hands on his knees, steadying himself—that meant they’d really sunk a Chinese warship. All the people they’d hurt.

  Had anyone died?

  He thought of the people in that underground British bunker, how quickly the place had flooded. If it was all real, were the knocked-out soldiers OK? Did they get out of there in time?

  “There’s no way we can get you to believe us,” Jackie said. “In a way I’m glad you’re skeptical. But now we have to wrap this up before you get caught. Listen, Ro. Mr. Culum and Atomic Frontiers are dangerous, and they’re up to something big.”