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  I gotta admit, I was pretty scared. These freaks had no intention of letting us go. We were alone. Mi was . . . well, wherever. Not at my side, that’s for sure. And I couldn’t watch her back, either.

  My team was toast. For all I knew, this might be the end of the road. No more CO. No more missions, no more gaming. No more life. Just a blank cell and no idea why I’d lost everything I ever had. A life sentence. But for what crime? Had we lost one too many times?

  Dakota was right next to me, and I could hear her machine buzzing away. They say it takes intelligence to feel fear, so on that scale, she was a lot more intelligent than I’ll ever be. Her heart rate was off the charts, pinging like a pinball machine.

  “Shut off the lights,” a voice from out there, behind the apparatus, told someone.

  The lamps died. Now we could see better. A big room. An operating theater. Faces pressed up against glass in the overhead viewing area. Four or five men on the floor with us, checking the readouts, making adjustments, pointing data out to each other.

  “No spots?” one of the techs asked.

  “Don’t you think bright interrogation lights are way overdone?” another guy answered. I got a good look at him: Long hair, tied back. Glasses. Lab coat. He even had a clipboard. How cute.

  The man stared at me and I made a point of glancing over his head. There it was, his tag, BlackStar_1.

  Around the room, the others from the desert town were there: BlackStar_2, 3, and so on.

  The whole gang was back together again.

  “So you respawned?” I said to BlackStar_1. “That’s a cheese-dick way to keep playing, if you ask me.”

  No response.

  “I got you good,” I boasted. Empty words, to be sure. He wasn’t the one about to get cut open.

  He smiled. Maybe he liked to banter with the toys. “I didn’t see you behind that mailbox, Phoenix. Good spot. Good move. But I guess that’s why we give you all the tough gigs, huh?”

  My turn to smile. “Let’s play that scene again, bro. I’ll come up with a better angle to counter a rigged gun.”

  “Clever.” He nodded, then turned to a buddy. “Hand him a pistol.”

  BlackStar_8 stood up, a redheaded guy with bad teeth, and pulled a nice chrome-plated Desert Eagle off a table. He walked over, freed my arm, and slapped the semiauto into my hand.

  “Now,” BlackStar_1 said to me, “you can either shoot yourself in the head—and as soon as you do you go right back to Re-Sim and Mi and your home base—or you can use that huge thing to punch holes in me and everyone else in the room.”

  I didn’t think twice. I raised the gun right to his forehead and pulled the trigger.

  CLICK!

  Darn!

  CLICK!

  CLICK!

  Empty! How many times were they going to pull that?

  BlackStar_1 smiled. Seemed like I’d given him the right response.

  “See!” he barked at one of the other techs. “Great reaction time. No hesitation. I just don’t see the issue here. Our numbers are still at an all-time high and growing steadily. Sales through the roof. Corporate loves our product. Phoenix, and every NPC like him, they’re performing flawlessly, just like I predicted.”

  “You don’t get it yet, Max,” BlackStar_4 spat back at him. “The issue is not with that generation. The issue is with the new recruit.”

  “Her?”

  “Her.”

  “Dakota?”

  “I told you before what happened. About the anomaly.”

  “Sam, she’s been fighting just fine for weeks,” BlackStar_1 countered. “One inventive episode? Don’t we want that? And it could have been a scratch on a disc. A bad relay cable. Anything. One little power surge and you all lose it.”

  “But if it re-creates itself, if there’s a virus or a bug of some kind crawling around in there, think about that. We could have a systems crash. What if all of our NPCs simply want to stop fighting? Our customers don’t want to talk things out. They want to shoot things out. The whole thing would fold over-freakin’-night if we lose our edge.”

  BlackStar_1—I’d gathered his actual name was Max—was nodding but seemed unconvinced. He asked, “Think you can replicate the error?”

  “Even if we could, it’s not like we could do anything about it other than erase that whole batch file. Once they’re spiked, none of the units can be retroactively altered.”

  I was starting to catch on. And it was some scary stuff. I liked Dakota. A lot. Good team member. Fun to watch fight. So what if she kooked out every now and then?

  I hoped she was catching on too, because I was pretty sure the next couple of moments were going to determine the rest of her life. Or whether she’d have a rest of her life.

  A bunch of the guys started punching buttons, configuring things, and generally acting like they were about to launch a space station.

  “What do you want to do for an environment?” a tech asked. “Return her to the original landscape? That Nec war? Replicate every last battle condition?”

  More voices:

  “Do we have to go that far?”

  “How about dropping her in the middle of imminent danger and seeing if that triggers the irrational response?”

  “Didn’t we just try that?”

  I turned my head to look at Dakota, to see if she realized this whole thing was centered on her. All of it. From getting dropped into the HILLS environment to the chase to the fiery town battle to the long ride in the cage.

  Even, I thought, giving us all that food and those hot showers.

  The whole time, they’d been trying to elicit a particular response.

  Did she get it?

  Because they hadn’t gotten that response yet.

  Did she understand the way she was turning our universe upside down? The way she could, if she acted incorrectly, end my life? Her life? The team’s lives? Mi and Reno and York, if they were back home at CO, might not even realize they were dying as the whole base was simply shut down.

  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. Stro
nger. 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.

  Level 9

  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 looke
d 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.