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  Out on the edge of my vision, I saw York and Reno lean in. Mi didn’t. She was moving the other way but keeping a watchful eye on the two of us. Crazy moment, until . . .

  Dakota asked simply, “Tell me. Tell me straight. Don’t lie. What am I?”

  I never looked away, even though the answer was going to really hurt. And like I said before, I liked her. Loved her, in fact. Like a brother. Like a sister. Even more deeply, though, because I had shared things with her that very few ever share with anyone: death, pain, survival.

  Reliance, conquest, peace.

  Trust. More trust.

  “What are you?” I repeated, hoping she would begin to figure it out for herself.

  “Really, Phoenix, am I just a disposable enemy? A kind of highly trained worker for some big industrial gaming company? Why do I have to live here, in this complex? I want a real home. Why do I have to fight every day? It makes no sense. Really. None of it adds up. I don’t remember making this choice.”

  I let her go on. I knew she would.

  Her voice had come up a bit, and everyone else in the room was starting to follow along. A lot of it probably sounded pretty familiar to some of them. If they too had begun to wonder what it was all about.

  “I mean”—she was stumbling a bit as the chain began to form—“I can think. I can feel pain. I need to eat and sleep and have time off. But every other indicator points to me just being another cog in the industry. I’m the enemy. The gamer kills me and blows me up. But I can adapt. I can learn. I can adjust. But then I’m the enemy again. And again . . .”

  York and Reno, I saw, kind of knocked fists. Not like when you celebrate, but more like when something is getting shared that you both hold inside. That you also keep deep down. Memories so painful or ideas so hard that they really shouldn’t surface all too often.

  Dakota, though, she was on the verge. She was about to tip over . . .

  “All this time I thought maybe this is like a camp of some kind. Perhaps I’m enrolled in some kind of army or military and this just has to be my everyday life for a while. Until I get the rest of my memories back. But, Phoenix, really, that makes no sense. I have . . . conscience, right? ’Cuz I also wanted to heal? This isn’t all there is . . .”

  She was looking around. The steel walls. The charm-free tables and chairs and rooms and cabins and everything—from forks to spoons to pillows—all sporting that BlackStar logo.

  “There’s more,” Dakota said firmly, trying to convince herself.

  But she was wrong, of course. This was all there was. This was all we got.

  “There has to be more. This cannot be all . . .”

  Then, like she’d discovered some kind of perfect argument, she yipped, “What happened to Jevo? Why didn’t he ever come out of Re-Sim that day? Is he free?”

  I shrugged. No, not free. Jevo was gone. It happened. We burned out sometimes. Sometimes we didn’t reboot. Everything eventually becomes obsolete.

  I put my hand on her arm, very softly, and gave it a squeeze. I could feel the sharp tendons in her arm, the triceps. And I had a chance to do something I’d always wanted to do.

  I turned her hand over. The holo-tattoo was picking up the overhead light. Her brand was a shale blue with little specks and dots of green sparkling out. But the lettering, the series of bars and dashes that labeled her BlackStar property, I wanted to see them up close. The same way I had studied Mi’s.

  I’d suspected it, really, since the first day, when Dakota had seemed so afraid. That her tattoo would be different. That on there, somewhere, was a different slash or character.

  A bit of syntax. A string of new commands. An upgrade.

  But it wasn’t in the characters. There was a difference. Was it brighter? Did it glow a bit more than ours?

  Not really. It was the color. So slight. But hers was indeed darker.

  I put my own hand next to it just to make sure—that’s when she pulled away.

  That was all meaningless to her. She was quivering. Shaking in small spurts. So strange for what she is—essentially, just a long string of 1s and 0s stored in some supercomputer database somewhere.

  “I’m not just a program,” she whispered. “I know there’s more, Phoenix. I have memories. Real, live, actual memories.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think you do, Dakota. I’m sorry, but they’re just part of the code.”

  One half of her hadn’t accepted it. The other half had but didn’t want to. But it was tipping.

  Mi—and I never heard her coming—sat on the other side of our teammate. She put a caring arm around Dakota’s shoulders, and the two of them broke into slight sobs. Tears came from their eyes, perhaps the first tears that weren’t caused by the real pain we found every day and every night on a thousand different battlefields across programmers’ warlike imaginations.

  “There’s more to me,” Dakota was saying. “I know there’s more than just this.”

  Mi was shaking her head no, holding Dakota tightly now, helping our friend let it all out. The sobbing got heavier and heavier.

  I took my hands off Dakota. I sure didn’t want to hurt her, but is it worse to not know a painful truth than to know it, face it, and learn to live with it?

  Because we all have something we live with. Some hard fact. Some inconceivable notion. So take it on. Headfirst, right?

  Remember, we hear chatter from you in the outer world. You have a short life span. You get sixty years, maybe. You fight disease and crime and poverty and a thousand other things. If you fail out there, you don’t return to the checkpoint. If you get hurt, you might not heal.

  Not us. If we get hurt, BlackStar puts us right back together.

  If we get hungry, they program a meal. If we get tired, they recharge our batteries.

  So we have our own painful truth to deal with. And Dakota had just figured it out.

  “I can’t just be a computer program.” Dakota was still crying. “I’m real. I have feelings. I think and act independently and have needs and frailties and fears and . . .” But her voice was already fading.

  Because sure, she thought she had all those things. The same way I thought I had a girlfriend and the loyalty of my team and a plate of biscuits and gravy in front of me on the table.

  But it was illusion. It was all 1s and 0s.

  Mi explained. She told Dakota, very caringly, what the rest of us already knew.

  “You’re not just a computer program, Dakota, please remember that. You’re the most advanced program written by any human, ever. You do think. You do feel. You react and strategize and provide the highest-quality opponent ever produced. Please, if nothing else, take pride in that. You are actually, of course, some kind of megacomputer, sitting in a bank of perfect computers somewhere, so outstanding and amazing and unique that you’re a shining star. You’ve got an unlimited life span. You’ll never get sick. Never go without nourishment or companionship.”

  “But I don’t want to be an NPC,” Dakota said, sniffling. “I don’t choose to be artificial intelligence.”

  “And some gamers probably don’t want to be mortal.” York tried to help. “Ever play? It could not possibly get any more boring than it is out there. Drama, work, school, bills, work, school, no joy. No thrills. Nothing.”

  Reno added, “And the bare truth is, we can’t change who we are.”

  “You all know this already?” Dakota asked, looking around.

  I nodded. York and Reno did too. Most of the room was trying to help. To empathize. For some reason this realization was coming hard to Dakota, harder than it had to any of us.

  “I’m sorry.” Mi was also sniffling.

  “Me too, Dakota,” Reno offered.

  “So I’m just some box in some server bank?” the girl moaned. “Nothing but a set of commands and reactions? Everything preprogrammed to serve the needs of a bunch of video game addicts?”

  “I don’t think anyone has any more guarantee that they’re not the same thing,” Mi as
sured her. “Who really knows what they are or where they came from? Not a single being, ever, has figured that out.”

  “And which is better?” I asked. “For us, in here, we have each other. Our needs are met. We do our duty and we do it better than anyone ever has. It kind of has to be enough.”

  “But this is all so real.” She knocked the table. It made a perfect CLANG.

  She knocked it again.

  The same perfect, recorded CLANG.

  “I just can’t get used to the idea that someone might trip over a power cord and my life would be over.”

  “Well, I’m sure there are backup generators,” York said.

  “And backup files,” Reno added. “Battery packs too. They can’t take chances.”

  “If you think about it, we’re probably so valuable they pay more attention to us than they do to a lot of people on machines in the hospitals.”

  “It still makes no sense. There are holes everywhere.” Now Dakota was just arguing.

  “Really?” Mi asked.

  “Really,” the girl assured her, trying to convince herself that she was indeed flesh and blood somehow. That she did actually breathe air and digest food and feel emotion rather than exhibit predetermined reactions to everything.

  Her mind was searching so randomly now. “Or maybe I’m dead? I remember falling from a really high place, a wall of rock zooming down. It’s so vivid. Am I hallucinating all this before I hit?”

  No one answered. We’d all been tossed off cliffs before. Hundreds of times.

  “When I was maybe four or five I liked to play cowgirl,” she continued. “When I was around twelve I could reprogram satellites. No, that’s not fake information. I remember things. Summer camp. Maybe a soccer game? Swim lessons. Yes, swim lessons for sure. From that, uh, guy? Girl. What was her name? In a pool. No, a lake. The water was too cold or something.”

  “NPCs can’t swim,” Mi reminded her.

  “I had friends. I had a life.”

  “Can you name them?” York asked.

  “There’s more. Your explanation doesn’t add up.”

  York leaned over. “Or, admit this, it could be that you’re programmed to think it doesn’t add up?”

  Dakota glared at him. Real hatred. “It does not answer everything,” she stressed. “I feel more for some of you than others. Some I don’t like at all, York. The point is, I feel. I get hungry. Maybe I’m being tricked. Maybe you’re all in on it.”

  Was she just blowing off steam now? Or grasping?

  “I have sadness. I get afraid. I experience joy. I’m lonely, even when we’re all together. I’m different from the rest of you . . .”

  She pinched her arm. Ran her fingers through her hair. Held her breath till she turned blue. Stomped her own toes with the heel of her boot.

  “OW!”

  But she was just kidding herself. One way or another, it was all programmed response.

  Level 10

  It must have been some kind of holiday break for the next three days. New games were hitting the boards, and we were busy beyond belief. I gotta admit I didn’t think, at that point, Dakota was going to make it. I was 90 percent sure BlackStar was going to pull her plug . . . and that one day she just wouldn’t come out of Re-Sim.

  Maybe we’d run in to her again someday. Maybe with Jevo, both of them dressed up as fuzzy dinosaurs or a squad of heart-throwing teddy bears.

  That’s the way it happened when one of us became obsolete, outdated, whatever you want to call it. And the team, to be sure, usually knew it was coming. For a while leading up to it, the guy or girl would just fight too slow. Miss too many shots. Not be able to keep up with the pace and complexity of the gaming environment.

  It’s hectic in there. You know it is. This isn’t PONG anymore. Tons of stuff comes at you constantly. It’s exhilarating. Relentless. Some gamers, and some programs, just can’t hack it.

  Most gamers have seen us when we overheat. You run into an NPC who’s totally confused. Who walks into walls. Who can’t stand up and fire from behind their cover. Who just drives off a bridge or lets you walk right over and cap them in the forehead.

  Just so you know, those aren’t gaming glitches. Those are NPCs who’ve finally worn out.

  So our team, when this started to happen, well, we knew the days wouldn’t be long for that one. Sooner or later, there’d be a replacement. The public demanded constant innovation. NPCs had to continue to step up. And whoever wasn’t cutting it would simply die in the game environment and never make it back out of Re-Sim.

  That’s the road Dakota was on. I couldn’t see any other end. For whatever reason, her new-model programming just wasn’t up to this task. Sooner or later, she’d fail to meet minimum requirements and we’d get assigned another teammate.

  Nine hours of ZOMBIE SPACE PIRATES VS. SUBHUMAN ORGAN SCAVENGERS later, though, Dakota was still by my side. This was one twisted-up game, because, as everyone knows, your garden-variety subhuman scavengers have a very limited vocabulary. Between chop-shopping and auctioning the limbs and organs of all those gamers, we really didn’t have much ability to formulate a strategy. All we could do was eat, chop, sell, chop some more, body-jack more humans, strip them down, kidney, liver, heart, brain . . . It was an endless cycle.

  The gamers were zombie pirates; they tasted absolutely horrible. Ever eaten a zombie? No? Well, it’s exactly the putrid, rotting flavor you’d expect. No amount of ketchup is enough ketchup.

  So there we were, thirty-foot-tall scavengers, fistfuls of undead in one hand, giant bottles of ketchup in the other, and I turned to look over and what do you know? There was Dakota, rending and tearing and chomping right along with the rest of us! It took three waves of gamers to wipe her out. She sure put up a good fight.

  Hadn’t seen that coming. I’d expected, to be honest, a lot more sulking.

  We got moved to radioactive spider-bat duty next, some RTS that had just been released. I think it was called NANO-SECT-ICIDE EXTREME!. You know a game is going to suck if they have to put the word “extreme” anywhere in the title.

  It did suck. A week later, no one would be playing. It’d disappear off the charts. Plus, the radioactive spider-bat suits they made us wear were really itchy. I don’t think it’s fun for any game combatant when the enemy is constantly stopping to scratch their privates.

  But again, Dakota hung tough. Very tough. She seemed to be getting into all that swooping and neck biting and voracious slurping. Something had come over her. Maybe she’d make it after all.

  I love playing The Black Knight. “None shall pass.” You better bring your A-game if you want to cross my bridge.

  Of course, in EVIL KING ART VS. JEDI ASSASSINS, I wasn’t really on the side of good. And gone were the steel swords of yore, replaced by attack dragons and laser scepters and armor you can mod with auto-crossbow blasters and power gauntlets.

  Still, the idea remained the same: There was a king, and to stay king, he enlisted every able-bodied man from the villages to be one of his soldiers. The poor were heavily taxed and labored from dawn to dusk. They had no schools or means of bettering themselves. This King Art didn’t even allow them to own weapons with which they might have hunted or protected themselves from roving bandits or fork-tongued wizards.

  Kings are usually like that. Plus, Arthur had more important things to do. Like build up his castle walls and drink grog with his ladies while he watched me lop the heads off any who would dare pass.

  Heck, it wasn’t even much of a bridge I had. More like a log over a river. I was winning, though, and the fights were a blast. The Black Knight doesn’t just claim invincibility, he needs to back it up.

  Gamer after gamer attacked. I barely picked up a nick in my leggings. They shot arrows and swooped on flying beasts and one of them even tried some kind of magic spell he’d gotten from a mountain witch. It was weak. Sure, it turned my mace into a poisonous serpent and my horse into a rabbit. In response I fed the rabbit to the snake, then cut
off its head and shook the bunny way down toward the tail end.

  There, I had my mace back.

  After I hacked up the gamer, I took his horse.

  But something happened, and I wished Dakota had been there to hear it. There was a pause in the game as we leveled up, and I was under the bridge, down in the shadows, when a pair of new victims tromped up.

  I could pick up their crosstalk.

  One said, “Hey, Todd, you get that factory slot?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Lucky, man.”

  “It’s a factory, brother, hot as a mother in there.”

  “Yeah, but now you get the brand.”

  “I’m just workin’ for chits, same as you. After tax I barely clear rent.”

  “Bro, no whining. You’re in now. On the good side of the wall for sure.”

  “I’m a corporate serf.”

  “You’re stoked is what you are. Better days ahead. Nose to the stone. Plus, you got bennies, right? Meds. Protection. Store discounts?”

  Then there was a silence.

  “Do good in there. It’ll lead to more.”

  They both forgot their problems because I jumped out and took ’em by surprise. It wasn’t more than a few moves and I had them lanced, stood up, and planted in the ground like giant olives on a stick.

  In here, these guys’ problems were not better jobs or the cost of living or feeling like their lives only served the rich and powerful.

  No, they should’ve been a little more concerned with perimeter defense, squad integrity, and overlapping fields of fire.

  Level 11

  DUNGEON OF DEATH XXV, the ongoing saga of a dungeon. Where there’s death. And the gamers must sneak in and free their comrades before my drones can replace their good spinal columns with my remote-controlled fiendish spinal columns.

  The tweak here is that I was playing the role of Boss, and while I really prefer to be a top general, the gig had its moments. As a general, I get to alter my troop and weapons placement and our defensive or offensive strategy. I can pace our engagements and watch for weaknesses in gamer tactics. The days when we villains rush blindly into a room or over a ridge one after another are long gone. No fun in that for either side.