Game Slaves Page 21

  Great. So I catch them together, and what does the mighty Phoenix actually do? I give Reno a pillow and Mi some medicine. What a tough guy.

  Back to York and the front of the store.

  Our enemy was right outside now. There he was, the hooded shadow from the limousine.

  “He just strolled up, not a care in the world,” York said, pointing his rifle center-mass even though his bullets would never get through the Plexiglas. “I’ll open the door, you pretend like he gets to come in to talk, and then I cap him here on the inside floor so we can take his stuff. Then they’ll know we mean business.”

  “No,” I answered.

  I couldn’t see his face behind his tall collar, just the eyes, but immediately, I knew Mi was right.

  Under that hood I was sure was someone who, at the least, looked a whole lot like me.

  “Let him in. I want to hear what he has to say. We all do.”

  York stared at me, cold, as I gave the order. Not because he thought I was losing it, but because he knew about letting the enemy behind your lines. He knew about suicide bombs and tracking devices and surveillance gear that can be hidden in a freckle.

  “He’s wired for sure! They’ll fix on our positions. They’ll plot our weapons capabilities. They’ll know our health. Phoenix, this is a major mistake.”

  “Let him in.”

  The gate slid up. York unbolted the main door, and then there was one more of us inside.

  Our gun sights never left his head. All safeties were off. My heart, and it’d taken a beating lately, was hammering away.

  Why? Because of one man? Maybe because this was the man. Just from his confident gaze, you knew he was a player.

  We moved toward the electronics section. You couldn’t even hear his feet touch the floor, and this was a big, empty echo chamber now.

  His hood panned around, eyes taking in everything. A nod.

  “Very impressive, Phoenix.”

  I nodded back. I didn’t need his approval.

  “My experts said we’d catch you trying to make a run into the wasteland. So in different spots, we left all our defenses down to bait you. Why didn’t you run?”

  “Is there a better life out there?”

  A shake of his head under the hood. “No. There’s no life out there, it’s all fed out. Then we thought you’d try to take a truck and a squad, so we drove out a bunch of vehicles and fried some buildings. Didn’t bite there, did you?”

  “What good would one van do against hundreds?” I asked.

  “But we found you eventually. Nice run. A great run. Sorry to see it end like this.” His voice was so sure, so confident. Like he had the ultimate ace left to play.

  The man said, “We really didn’t expect this kind of offensive. Ingenious. You’ve got everything we need. People are already hungry. We need the new rivet and plate shipment down at the wall.” Outside, lightning cracked, but I was sure the construction on the metal beast would go right on.

  Then the cloak came off.

  So there he was. The man was almost my perfect twin. Older, yes. Some gray hair on the sides, but he wasn’t past his thirties. There was no port, of course, but he did have that beautiful tattoo around his palm. The BlackStar brand.

  And those eyes of his, they burned with power. He was in charge. He was BlackStar.

  “Hello, brother,” he said.

  “Not brother,” I answered. “More like spawn.”

  “Spawn. Good choice of words.”

  “I assume you’re BlackStar_1.”

  “That’s right. Number one.”

  I stared at him. A lotta hate. In the back of my mind this guy’s chances of leaving the store alive were about the same as my chances of sprouting wings.

  “What is he?” asked Dakota, dying to know. “Your older brother? Young father?”

  “No,” I answered for him, “but we are related, aren’t we?”

  “Twins?” she guessed.

  “No,” he told her, “much more than that.”

  I got it now. Originally, he was the world’s top player, right? He ran the most successful gaming company on the planet. Something in his DNA helped him rise right to the top.

  So once we escaped, what should we have expected but a master strategy? We weren’t going up against some novice. We’d been playing the guy who wrote all the mission code.

  If there is a digital god, it’s the guy who typed the first line of binary. The original 1010 himself.

  “I’m going to win this, you know,” he said to me.

  “What do I call you?” I demanded, the old commander coming out.

  “Max, you can call me Max. Or Mr. Kode, or just sir. Daddy? Master? God? What’s it matter? I have a thousand gamer tags. You have even more copies yourselves. I’ve gone in there. I’ve tested you over and over. I’ve hung out at your CO sometimes. Just to see what kind of new edge you’re working on.”

  Then he turned to my team. “But you, and Mi, Dakota, York, Reno, I want you to know before things get really out of hand, there’s no way you can win this. You simply cannot walk away from us. There’s only one end to this race, and that’s for you all to go back in the tank.”

  “Oh, we’ll play,” York promised, itching to blast something. “And we’ll win. We always win.”

  “You sometimes win,” Kode replied harshly, “and you sometimes lose. The analog world out here is just as much a crapshoot as the digital one you escaped. What needs to happen now is for you to realize that in this environment, on this frontier, you, Phoenix, absolutely cannot win no matter what. Your own bodies are already telling you why. The clock is ticking down. Your biological doomsday devices have no shutoff code.”

  “What doomsday devices?” Dakota asked.

  At that moment, someone coughed. I thought it was Mi again, but when I looked up, I saw that she’d given the chest bug to Reno. He was wiping a spot of blood off his lip.

  My lungs, to be honest, were also on fire. So was the skin around my eye.

  Kode went on. “But if you come with me, then I’ll give you a way where you can walk out with whatever you want. Or think you want. I offer you complete defeat and certain death . . . or . . . partial victory. No more, no less.”

  “Whatever we want?” asked Dakota.

  “Name your price. Name any price, Dakota. I can build you a nice fairyland in there with a family and picnics and minivans. There are no limits, but to really win, you have to choose to go back in the tank.”

  “What is he talking about?” Mi rasped, her chest heaving as speaking got tougher. “In the tank? Or out?”

  I told my team, “I think what the dark lord here is saying is that one way or another, this filthy world is eventually going to kill every one of us.”

  Max smiled as if my words made him happy, like he’d won a brief victory. “This world will kill you, Mi. Just like it’ll kill me, and my friends, everyone in the company, my kids, their kids, and so on. For you, it’s just a lot quicker.”

  “You’re offering, what, tank immortality versus . . . what?”

  Kode replied, “Being mortal and biological out here is not a winning strategy if you look at the long game. A tank life is predicted to be ten times the duration of a regular human life. Maybe more.” Reaching into a pocket with two fingers, the BlackStar president pulled out a small metal device and dropped it on the table.

  “Plus, we do still have a kill switch.”

  It was the size of a small flashlight and had a familiar hollow input on one end. On the other were batches of tiny optical fibers hanging loosely, just waiting for a neuro-connection.

  I knew what it was. So did Dakota. The other three stared for a moment.

  The outer surface was curled like a corkscrew blade. One that you drill sideways through eye sockets.

  Then Kode pulled a detonator from another pocket. He hit a button, and the small device exploded. Bits flew everywhere. There was nothing left but dust and a smoldering burn mark.

  He
clicked another switch. “There. All your implant triggers are now live. You didn’t think we could just allow you to run around free, did you?” He grinned. “You’re very expensive collateral. Worth everything to this city. We’ll go to any length to protect our investment. Our way of life depends on those supply trucks. And in turn, the trucks depend on your playing games as the villain. From in the tank.”

  Brilliant. He was so cold. Decisive. A true gamer. I hated him and loved his moves. Apples don’t fall too far from the tree, do they?

  “That’s the fail-safe?” I asked, pointing to the debris, already knowing the answer. “A brain bomb?”

  “When we first came up with your NPC program, I demanded we install a foolproof termination device. I couldn’t very well allow you to fall into a competitor’s hands, could I? Seattle still makes games. San Diego. But they’re so far behind. Redwood needs commerce. Superior game enemies are our sole market advantage.”

  My hand was rubbing the side of my head. Blisters popped. Everyone on my team was also fingering the device in their skull.

  I could feel the throb around my input. Dark bands had begun crawling under the skin, north toward my brain, south toward my heart.

  But now, of course, a little pus and some swelling were the least of my worries. How much C4 was behind my eye sockets? Enough.

  “So why haven’t you blown us up already?” Mi demanded. “Why let us run around out here? You could just terminate the runaways and drill more baby skulls.”

  Kode’s face gave away nothing. It was stone.

  “Yeah, why?” I repeated. “Let me guess. We weren’t your average gamer villains, were we? Too valuable to detonate? Or too hard to build?”

  Kode nodded. “Both.”

  “I get it.” I looked at Mi. “I’m not his son or his brother. I’m a slice off the top gamer’s brain stem.”

  “A big slice,” Kode confirmed. “And a very painful one. The extraction procedure’s incredibly difficult.” He turned his neck and pulled aside the hood so we could see his spine. There were multiple scars across the vertebrae, deep and jagged.

  I turned to Kode. “So tell me, is Mi, in real life, your wife? A girlfriend? Secretary?”

  Kode’s face was flat. “Mi’s donor is our best research physicist, named Morgan. Her tag is BlackStar_4.”

  “Dakota?”

  “Our open-world environmental artist. A rock climber. We bought her contract very recently, from the Black Hills refinery.”

  “York? Reno?”

  “Reno’s original brain stem tissue came from my first partner at BlackStar, a programmer named Cooper. He was number two at the company, and also, so you know, in this life, he was Morgan’s brother.”

  “Brother?” Mi asked, looking over at Reno.

  “Unfortunately,” admitted Kode, “Cooper died last year in a horde infiltration. It was big, and bad. He shouldn’t have left our neighborhood, should have let the citizens take the hit, but he was always too soft. Before that we wanted to order the materials for a wall, and losing a key guy like that pushed the order along.”

  I saw Mi put her arms around Reno’s neck, but now it didn’t hurt me at all. They were family.

  Evidently, Kode liked to spout backstory. “Morgan and Cooper were close. She’s still pretty upset about all that, and all this, too. She misses him badly.

  “York,” he continued, “was grown from BlackStar_3. He runs the company finance department.”

  “I’m a numbers nerd in real life?” York sounded shocked.

  “You’re a nerd in this life too,” Mi reminded him, now putting the pieces together. “So we’re all just copies of the company’s big brass?”

  “Yeah,” barked Dakota, angry. Hyperventilating a bit too. “How could you do that to your own offspring? Or selves or whatever? Toss them in a tank for eternity? That is some sick, twisted shi—”

  “Grow up, Dakota.” Kode cut her off. “The real world isn’t all garden parties for the people who have to make the tough decisions. You don’t have the nerve to make the calls I have to make.”

  He waved to the store around him. “XMart ships us what they decide we get to have. Ten years ago, we couldn’t even get bullets. We were losing families three at a time, every night, dragged off into that desert. Then my team starts making good games and cheap controllers. Plugging in became the best way for any city, anywhere, to control the rabble and give them something better than the horrible lives they were all cursed with.”

  “Don’t forget to mention your bottom-line profits,” I snarled, thinking of his enormous mansion on the hill.

  “Right, profits. With which we train and equip our troops. Who protect those poor slobs and their families. Give them roofs over their heads. Heat. Work. Clothing. Which is a whole lot more than they’d get out beyond the city limits.”

  “You act like they should be grateful for the pitiful existence you force on them,” Dakota growled.

  “Not just them.” He pointed right in her face. “You might try showing a little more gratitude too, Dakota.”

  “I don’t owe you anything.”

  “You owe me everything, sweetie. Without our tank program, you wouldn’t even be alive. You wouldn’t be two cells, let alone billions of them. I made you. We gave you life. We give you a purpose. We allow you to exist. So now how about saying ‘Thank you, sir’ and scooting your skinny little butt back up the hill so we can get our top game engines back online?”

  I thought Dakota might put a hole in his head right that second.

  Little did I know she had even more twisted plans.

  But I needed to try to defuse this. Maybe get my hands on that detonator.

  “So,” I said to Max, diverting his attention. “What gave you the balls to try and clone human game engines to run your servers?”

  I’d fed his ego. Like I said, he clearly loved to tell his story.

  Level 42

  “How could we not try clones?” Kode began. “And it’s not like we started out thinking that we’d end up with a basement full of experimental bodies. Plus, the cost for day-old babies? Brilliant ones? And a lot of them? Too steep.”

  “You’re a sick—” spat Dakota.

  “Oh, yeah, I’m a lot of things,” the man admitted. “But you don’t know what it was like. We launched those first games, mostly just to see if we could pull it off, and a month later we had more sales than we could count. Redwood went from a dying border town to an XMart prize. No going backward then. And those of us who got it there? Rewards, baby. We get the perks.”

  “What do average people get?”

  “Jobs. To live. To have a security force that keeps them safe from the animals. Food on the table. Redwood’s standard of living is assured as long as we continue to deliver. Everyone everywhere plays games. They go in there to shoot or race or just socialize and run their mouths. Now, with the tiara controller, we can make you feel the action, or the pain, or the love.”

  “But we have human rights.” Dakota still didn’t want to accept all this.

  Kode spouted, “I’m not going to have this argument with you. You don’t have rights. Technically, you don’t exist, and neither did any of your previous versions, and, bad news, Dakota, we had to put them down too.”

  “Put other versions . . . ?”

  “It isn’t easy keeping you all alive, you know. Very tricky stuff. Very expensive. The first manipulation begins in an embryonic state. Then we fit the full-size port into a tiny skull so it grows around it. Feed it life experiences and data—well, that’s top-secret big-league tech. We have to bring in biomed and neuroprogrammers constantly. Plus, there’s a high failure rate. The mutations are unpredictable. I think you’d puke if you saw those pictures.”

  “I’m not the first Dakota?”

  Kode snickered. “But you, now, are a great generation, this time around. The best yet. Man, all of you even got out. Wow, what a move! Major props there. But you’re sick, so go back in the tank. I’m willin
g to deal.”

  Dakota had tears in her eyes. So much for the family who missed her or the manicured hedge around the house in the suburbs. “Having grown us in a dish still doesn’t give you the right to play life and death . . .”

  “Doesn’t it? Of course it does. You’re my property. My creative assets. You guys never played the old games. Eight soldiers always attacked from the same bunker every single time anyone tried that level. The cars always came in the same order. The enemy army was always packing the same weapons, every time through, and shooting from predictable places. It took one or two run-throughs before players knew the game tendencies, and then they’d really seen all the tricks the designers could come up with.”

  “So you wanted to plug human unpredictability into the NPC?” I guessed.

  “Precisely. Nothing performs randomly or creatively like actual human neurons.”

  “Then why clone yourselves? That part I don’t get,” Reno interjected.

  “Where else were we going to get enough of the right stem cells? We needed DNA that simply rocks at games. We’re the best stuff out here. Which is why you’re the best stuff in there. Every one of my people makes the sacrifice. Over and over. We grew mutated freak after pile of cellular jelly. There were a lot of failures. But finally, wow, it’s so worth it.”

  “But your own clone, locking it in that tank . . .”

  “Quit whining. You’ve had it way easier and safer than I ever did. Plus, you might live a thousand years if we keep changing the oil and rotating your tires.”

  I was doing the math, we all were. The ages didn’t add up. How could we be so old already?

  Kode was still ranting. “Was it hard? Oh, baby. Clones fall apart constantly. You need hypersterile conditions and a big vat of preservative. We buy steroids by the gallon. That’s how to do it right. Then, once the input hasn’t been rejected, we inject serious doses of growth hormone. You fill out fast. After all, we needed gamer brains quickly. We couldn’t very well sit around and wait for you guys to mature naturally. That’d take a generation.”