Game Slaves (11 page)

“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. What 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.

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.

Plus, that world might not ever open again. It could easily have been moved or deleted or modified for some new game, so there was absolutely no guarantee that Dakota's little machinations were going anywhere.

As the time passed, their little coven began to dissolve, and Mi made her way back to my arm. It was nice. I liked having her around. We fought better together, back to back, side by side. And the more we were on the same page, the more times we'd see gamers bite the dust and go all the way back to their last checkpoint. Hoo-rah.

Just so you know the truth . . . YES, when you lose—when we blast you and you're not on the battlefield anymore—we DO whoop it up and pump our fists and high-five and have a party to celebrate.

Darn right we do! We feel good. No, we feel
great
. You like to win? We like it more.

And you don't like us? Well, we don't like you much either.

The bottom line was that it was cool that our little journey into forbidden game space had gone unnoticed.

I got tricked that first time. Fine. No worries. But you know the score. We have a job to do and I have a team to protect. That's my prime directive. It's what I do best.

So if Dakota wasn't going to help out and get with the program, then . . . simple . . . for the good of the team . . . she'd be the one left behind.

 

HIGH PLAINS KILLER
came out a few days later, and now we were having some fun. Sure, future shooters and galactic battles are one thing, but there's a real draw to venturing back to the seedy Old West. I can't imagine there's a kid or adult alive who wouldn't like a chance to ride a galloping horse, jump over to a speeding train, race along the tops of the cars, stop the beast, and hold it up.

Great
times.

My team mostly played as the notorious Skinner gang, a band of ruthless thugs who shot first and took baths never. Our horses were smelly, our teeth were yellow, and our six-guns sagged low. We spat tobacco, blew our noses on our sleeves, and never, not once, said “Excuse me” after we burped.

You know those legends of outlaws lying around a campfire, farting beans? My crew was a refried symphony.

HIGH PLAINS
was a real triumph. The world stretched on for miles and miles and gigabytes more. The detail was fantastic. The characters, one after another, had their own novel-length stories to tell. Everyone who joined in the massive multiplayer game got to live and love and die as if they really were a frontier desperado. And every now and then, a few of them might get bold and test their mettle against the ruthless and odiferous Skinner clan.