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  Level 14

  Dakota looked around for at least a minute. The horizon was the same. The brush was unchanged. The wind was a constant, so steady it felt like a fan. It probably was a fan.

  So she reached out, stretching her arm forward, and the tips of her fingers hit something hard. It was invisible. A boundary. An edge of this place. The gate or door to the next.

  Now they were all up there, fumbling, feeling the transparent wall like they were mimes in a box as large as the world itself. York was moving left, Reno to the right, Mi and Dakota rubbing and exploring top to bottom.

  “Here,” Dakota said, her fingers wrapped around something about knee-high. Still, it was completely invisible, and from where I stood, I thought she might be pretending to have found the latch.

  She turned it, then pulled up. I had a vision spike of a typical suburban dad hoisting his garage door so he could get to his lawn mower. Now, there’s a memory that had no place in my head . . . Oh, wait, how men are men on the outside: mowing grass. Was that where we were headed? My spine shuddered with pure fear, and I don’t get scared too often.

  As Dakota pulled, a wide section of the desert landscape slid up and rolled into a cylinder. It was a door. A wide berth for the crawler to drive through. Inside, I saw a tunnel stretch down, a ramp leading exactly where Dakota hoped we’d be able to go.

  It was the road to the test center. Where we’d first faced the BlackStar team. Where they’d cornered the two of us, trying to find out what was wrong with their programming.

  All five of us stepped through, the heat immediately disappearing. Now it was icy cold, our breath forming a cloud around our position. The sun was gone. Five paces in, the door rolled shut, locking.

  I hate to make a comparison to games all the time, but it was just like when you step through a door and you know danger is lurking just ahead but that hatch behind you was one-way.

  As we shuffled along, none of us had to point out that it was getting much darker the deeper we went. After a while the only thing we could see was our breath, a wisp of white that would quickly evaporate in the frigid black.

  Footsteps and heavy, heavy breathing. My hands were out in front so I wouldn’t bump a wall. Couldn’t see them, either, not even the glow of our tattoos.

  I was sure the rest of the team were shuffling in the same pose. Down and down. That’s how we found our way. We knew the only way to go was to follow our feet into the basement of this empty level.

  How far did we descend? Who knew. And it wasn’t like this world was any more real than our own home base. It seemed like we were going down, but maybe we were going up. In all likelihood we weren’t really going anywhere at all. We were just tiny bits of energy mashing around on some digital grid. Little more than x-y-z coordinates plotted by a motherboard in some computer server in some air-conditioned data center in Dallas or Denver or who-really-cares-where.

  “What do you think the penalty is for trespassing?” York suddenly asked. “Would they program us into a prison cell for a few years?”

  “Or,” Reno suggested, “maybe they’d do some kind of system restore where we never actually trespassed.”

  “They can’t do that,” Dakota answered in the dark. “They can’t take back the past or change it. What’s done is done.”

  “On the contrary,” York countered, “they take players backward in time all the time in games. That’s what a gamer checkpoint is. A saved file. They save in that place, then the dude plays on, and if he fails and we win, they just reload him to the last save point.”

  “But you’re forgetting that you’re not a computer program,” Dakota spat at him, her breath hot and white in the blackness. “You and I talked about that for a long time, York. Your experience is cumulative. One day’s memories add to the next.”

  “I know, I know,” he replied. I was having a fun time listening. I was learning a lot about what crap Dakota had been feeding my team.

  “But,” he continued, “your ideas, Dakota, they didn’t answer all the questions either.”

  “I didn’t say I had all the answers. I’m just saying that accepting you’re just a computer program created by a video game designer—well, it doesn’t add up.”

  “Doesn’t add up how?” I interrupted. I had to hear that theory. I really wanted to know what she’d pitched my team that’d convinced them to disobey me and go off on this little junket into forbidden basements.

  Dakota had reached another wall. She bumped it hard and I heard her mumble, “Ouch.” That made me smile a bit through the gloom.

  This time her search was easy, and I heard a door handle click.

  “Phoenix, I think you already know. I think you’ve probably figured it out on your own. You’re too smart to have missed so many clues.”

  Man, is it annoying when someone tells you that you already know something you don’t already know. I just can’t stand it when people give me credit for being more intelligent than I actually am. Grant me a little ignorance, please. My programming is simple: fight, win, destroy, triumph. What more does a modern antihero need?

  She went on, “You don’t need me to tell you what’s been churning around in your head. Just listen to your own common sense, Phoenix. Take inventory of what you’ve really got in here. Then it’ll all become clear.”

  What was that? A riddle? I don’t do riddles. I do destruction and mayhem and Rating Board–approved high-definition digital violence! That’s my purpose, my core mission parameters. It’s my code.

  Take inventory? I didn’t have a single weapon. None of us did. Inventory = helpless.

  The door popped open. Light streamed in. And that’s when we saw it.

  It was hideous!

  It was monstrous!

  It was the most shocking, revolting, gnarly-gross surprise in the history of video games!

  And sure, she was cute. OK, she was adorable. All right, she was a darling little girl with blond hair and pigtails and a nice blue summer dress and an irresistible teddy bear tucked under her arm.

  She was all those things. And probably the most horrible enemy we could have ever encountered.

  With NPC monsters or gamers, at least they’re predictable.

  This, however, was going to be big trouble.

  Ever tried to reason with a five-year-old kid? Ever tried to get straight answers from a child?

  Good luck.

  Level 15

  The adorable waif shifted her weight from one tiny ballerina slipper to the other.

  “Hi, little girl, what are you doing down here?” Dakota said in a cutesy voice.

  I knew for a fact that wasn’t going to work.

  The correct opening statement was “DIE, you hideous bloodsucking parasite that’s assumed the shape of this harmless child!”

  The girl just stared up at us.

  York whispered to me, “I bet it’s one of the programmers, one of the men, dressed up like a little girl. This might be some kind of twisted fantasy game he’s creating.”

  I agreed and reached for my weapons. Unfortunately, I had none. I was still just wearing the standard-issue jumpsuit.

  “Let’s try scaring her, and she’ll lead us to her fiendish masters,” Reno whispered.

  Dakota was still baby-talking. “Are you part of the environment?” she asked. “Did you slip away from the BlackStar company daycare?”

  But the girl suddenly turned and pointed at me. “What are you doing here?”

  “Me?” I asked.

  “Yeah, you’re Phoenix. Daddy built you for BLASTERS OF FREEDOM, right? My brother has your poster.”

  I kind of blinked, then nodded. She was right. That was my first assignment.

  “Do you know the rest of these programs?” I waved around, looking for a gamer tag over her head. There was nothing, not even an Anonymous listing. I didn’t think a human could get online without a tag.

  The girl took a good look at my team, then pointed a finger at Dakota. “She’s the new model. Wh
at did they finally name you?” Her eyes went wide as she took in our blond friend.

  “Dakota.”

  “Good name.”

  “Do you have a name? Or a tag?” Reno cut in. York was still whispering that she was one of the BlackStar bigwigs, probably testing us, setting some kind of trap.

  But the girl shook her head. “I’m just Charlotte. I don’t get a tag till I turn eleven. Grumpy’s pretty strict about that.”

  “Grumpy?” I asked. Now we were getting somewhere. “Is he a dastardly, vicious, evil boss or something?”

  “No, he’s just my daddy. I just call him by his boss name when he works and sticks me in here to play.”

  “Works?”

  “Yeah, he made me come to the office with him too. Promised real ice cream. I’m not holding my breath.”

  Now the girl smiled. It is so hard to tell with a kid that age. You just never know if they’re smart for their years.

  Or, in this case, if they’re even that age for real.

  “Yeah,” she said, obviously bored and ready to walk. “He’ll let me run around in these test worlds, but as far as playing the shooter stuff, he says I gotta wait until I’m older.”

  “He lets you wander around here unsupervised?”

  “Sure.” She grinned. “Better than sitting on his office floor. I’ve got go-karts, ponies, jet boots, all kinds of brainteasers and puzzle books and places to explore. Never ran into you before, though. Why’d he link you in? Do you have some kind of challenge or scavenger hunt? A riddle? Or a quest? I want to go on a quest today! Please?”

  That big grin again. The moppy hair. The straight little teeth. Almost too perfect to be real. Like at any minute the talons and fangs and horns would sprout and the satanic beast within would burst into the fray.

  But this was no game. It was way too boring. Miles of walking. A long underground tunnel. No gamer alive would endure this kind of monotony.

  “How about a race?” Charlotte asked, waving to a line of rocket-powered skateboards. “Twice around the complex,” she ordered, jumping on.

  “But you know all the shortcuts.” Dakota laughed, immediately hopping on the deck right beside her.

  York and Reno shrugged, then climbed up as a “Three . . . two . . . one . . .” chimed automatically from thin air.

  Moments later, we were all zipping around. Arcing down the halls. Banking up on rolled corners. It was like riding a skateboard in a deserted airport or mall, and honestly, even without shooting or stabbing horrifying enemies, it was a whole lot of fun.

  Charlotte did know the shortcuts. And she was deadly with dropped banana peels.

  Next we rode Jet Skis through an underground river. Then we played a game of basketball and we could all jump about twenty feet at a time. The so-called girl even showed us her own airplane, a pink and purple number with lots of flowers and polka dots and a special copilot’s seat for her bear.

  The stuffing’s name was Bonkers. Pretty cool buddy. Didn’t say much, though. Not sure about his weapons rating. Kind of gave me the creeps—those things always come to life and start swearing and spraying bullets everywhere. OK, in my experience that’s what they do.

  I know it sounds crazy, but we spent the next couple of hours just playing with the kid. Why not? All she knew was my name, that Dakota was the new girl, and that she had some nice people she could play some very G-rated games with in a safe place.

  Yeah, after all the death and destruction we were immersed in every single day . . . to think that we’d find so much pleasure just hanging out with what we believed was the innocent little daughter of some real-world BlackStar bigwig.

  If I were a designer, I’d think about adding a little wholesome action like that to even the darkest titles. Coming up for air from the grim mayhem every now and then makes all the blind corners a lot more fun.

  Crazy stuff. But that really was a great afternoon.

  “I gotta go,” we heard Charlotte say. By now we were all tired from the races and were sitting around a big playroom. Toys tossed everywhere. Books lined the shelves, and traditional board games were stacked in alphabetical order from floor to ceiling. Imagine that, going into a virtual video game environment so you can pick up and play Monopoly or Clue or Chutes & Ladders.

  Charlotte liked Chutes & Ladders. She’d beaten Mi and Dakota three games straight. I guess I should mention the board opened up to life-size. Everyone wanted to “accidentally” land on that long slide over and over again.

  Anyway, she said, “I gotta go,” and that’s when I jumped over.

  “How do you know?”

  She didn’t look any different now than she had two seconds before.

  “Grumpy’s here, he’s tapping on my shoulder. I have to take the controller off now.”

  “Controller?”

  “It’s like a tiara. It’s how I play in here.”

  Dakota whispered, “Does he know we’re in here too?”

  A shrug, no clue. Then, “Didn’t he copy you over to come play with me?”

  “We kind of made our way in here ourselves,” Dakota replied honestly.

  “But you’re coming back next time? You have to.”

  Our new teammate, and my headstrong mutineer, smiled at the little girl. “Sure we will. Actually, I promise, because that’s how I made it so we could come in here now. I watched the boards back at our home for when this game got loaded again. You must have opened it. That’s how I tricked Phoenix into playing with us.”

  “I like him,” Charlotte said. “He’s kind of a dork, but he has big muscles.”

  “He’s actually a real sweetheart,” Dakota whispered. “Like our version of a teddy bear. He’s sort of our own Bonkers.”

  “I am not,” I protested.

  “Are so,” Dakota insisted. “You just don’t see it yet. But, Charlotte, we’ll come play with you again. Do you think, though, that next time your daddy takes you to work, you could check something for me?”

  “What?” the girl replied.

  Dakota started to say it out loud—I was dying to know. She looked at me and leaned over the child’s ear. Once she was done whispering, Charlotte waved bye-bye, then winked my way. Very strange. And in a poof of yellow light, she vanished from the room.

  Her father had disconnected her controller. Maybe work was over. Maybe the company daycare was closing.

  We’d never know.

  One second later, as the game environment shut down, we were sucked back to our base.

  Level 16

  All of us woke up on the Re-Sim tables. Of course, there was no repair work to be done.

  For a change, we looked great. Refreshed. Happy. Tanned. As if we’d just come back from a long vacation.

  “I feel awesome,” Mi chirped, bouncing over to me for a kiss. I looked up: no missions on the board. We had free time coming.

  How long had that taken? Hours? Days? More?

  “You’re in so much trouble,” I growled over to Dakota, rubbing the relaxation out of my neck.

  “I don’t think so,” she snapped back. “As far as BlackStar knows, we were all out there in some game somewhere. As long as the money rolls in, they’re still happy overlord jerks.”

  “You’re a program run amok. Like a killer robot, only without the robot part.” I think it was a pretty solid assessment.

  She looked at me, cocked her head, and said, “Well, if you’re right and I am a program, I’m simply following the code they themselves wrote. All I’m doing is executing whatever command BlackStar inserted that says find proof BlackStar is completely full of crap!”

  I wanted to argue, but, man, she was a step ahead of me there. How could I disagree? If I was right, she was right too, and all she was doing was what was in her programming.

  Or maybe she’d been hacked. But I didn’t have time to suggest that.

  She jumped off the table, high-fived York and Reno on the way out of the room, and disappeared down the hall.

  A week passed,
and while I’d been really nervous about repercussions from our illegal trip, nothing happened.

  None of us disappeared in our sleep. We weren’t demoted.

  Perhaps Dakota was right. How could they keep track of all of us? With millions of gamers out there, each of them battling dozens or hundreds of us, what if we were unaccounted for? System glitch, probably. Maybe it happened a lot. We all experienced those slowdowns and disconnections.

  See, I had some ideas about how this worked. Pretty simple stuff, like copy and paste, only on a computer-intelligence level.

  BlackStar designed me and upgraded me from time to time when I was coming back through Re-Sim, and that was the basis for game enemy NPC.

  Then I could be replicated as many times as needed across all the gaming sessions. Same with my team. Nothing to it. And since they’d designed us with this primitive form of self-awareness, we’d always put up a good fight for the gamers. We wouldn’t repeat our actions or strategies over and over. Everyone won.

  So what did I have to complain about? Nothing, really. I got to play those games every day at the highest level. Not to mention I had every need taken care of, great friends, and unlimited lives. Probably an unlimited life span too.

  And with the duplication, or the cloning, of my program, there might be thousands or tens of thousands of “me” in the gaming system at any time. And millions of my team members. BlackStar might be copying my innovative tactics and inventive gameplay instantly, over and over, and delivering it to everyone who is playing or will play that particular game and level.

  I don’t want to act like I’m some kind of genius or revolutionary being, but I am. I just don’t want to act like one. I mean, take a look at me: a prime physical specimen with superior everything. Don’t want people to get the idea there’s an ego beneath all this beauty, do we?

  York, Reno, and Mi mostly hung with Dakota for that next week, but it really didn’t bother me. Who knew what would happen? That girl, Charlotte, might have just been a random program anyway. An NPC left in the system from a preschool title, perhaps.