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[n]ice try.

PRISONERS OF GAMMA WORLD

It
never fails
. The moment your guard is down, Gamma World comes sliding back into place, unwholesome foliage and rusted metal stealing over everything. The grassy smell of a place where it’s always overheated summer. They used to talk about a nuclear winter but Gamma World is a permanent greenhouse. Maybe on the other side of the world it’s winter all the time.

Then the day comes when the world doesn’t change back. You wake and go to sleep and wake again and you’re still wrapped in furs on a slab of foam rubber in a bunker. Two days, a week. You get used to not taking showers; the tribe’s dogs curl up with you at night, and you start to carry a length of pipe with a kitchen knife duct-taped to the end. Melodee teaches you to hit a target with a crossbow made from a heavy wooden clothes hanger.

One night you’re summoned to meet the tribal chieftain and for a moment you’re afraid it’s going to turn out to be your father. It isn’t, but you recognize him anyway: in your world he is a city council member.

He tells you that to become a member of the tribe, you need to travel out into the crater ocean and bring back some treasure of use to the tribe.

Melodee will go with you, along with the chieftain’s son, who you remember from home as a lacrosse star. You went to his eighth-grade birthday party.

[t]his feels right, this is what you were waiting for.

[w]hat the hell are you doing?

SECRETS OF GAMMA WORLD

You paddle your way out across the water’s glassy surface, the bottom hidden by churning silt. You lead them through Cambridge streets haunted by spider-limbed mutant coyote and stray androids, down shallow-flooded Massachusetts Avenue, water barely clearing the parking meters, to the MIT campus.

You spot the familiar building and climb the two flights to the Physics Department and your father’s office and this time you break the glass like you’ve always wanted. His extra key card is in a drawer of a desk piled with final exams that will never be graded.

For a moment you think your father himself might have split the world just as a way of winning his divorce settlement. You wouldn’t put it past him. Maybe he did it and left your mom the radioactive half of everything, you included. It would explain why there’s no Gamma World version of your siblings. It would explain a whole lot else besides.

[i]t would, wouldn’t it?

BENEATH THE CRATER OCEAN

This part of Gamma World looks astonishingly like its counterpart in reality, except for the crevasse that opened up when the bombs fell. Warm water drizzles over the sides in long cascades, down and down past the lower levels of the city, the secret campus they never told you about, the one the Department of Defense built.

The chieftain’s son holds the rope, and you and Melodee go down, and down, to the War Room, just like in the movies. One wall of the chamber is an enormous world map that once must have displayed cities all over the world, incoming missiles, bomber flights, weather patterns, and radiation dispersal. They must have stood right here and watched your world end.

Neither of you speaks. Melodee takes your hand in hers, and for once it feels like things don’t have to stay this way. Maybe you don’t have to go home. Maybe you are home.

There is a large metal chair at the center of the room, with a set of electrodes.

On the control panel you notice a large red button.

[p]ress it.

It’s [b]etter not to know. How badly do you want to get home anyway?

ESCAPE FROM GAMMA WORLD

The strain was too great. Melodee’s father lies dying. Even his mutant abilities couldn’t reactivate the great engines you found underground. The kindly old physicist looks grave and tells you that you can save him and return home, but at the price of never returning to Gamma World again.

“What did he say?” Melodee asks when you return to the Great Laboratory.

If only you could tell her everything. If only she’d believe you! But how can you even begin to explain that the world she sees every day is false: false color, false wind, and feeble, watery false sunlight. The Emerald City, the Robot Zone, University Sector, the Mass Spike, the Space Port, the Tombs, the Poison Ocean. False.

And face it, the world you came from is no better. The golden treasure-house of your life has come to this, a poison waste.

Even now you can feel yourself slipping back to the other world, the drab world you called home. You promise her you’ll return, and you half believe it.

Melodee’s powers are only beginning to awaken. You see a last glimpse of the giant machines of Project Gemini, the idea that tore the dimensions apart. But you’re young. You’re both only teenagers. Have faith.

Maybe one day, between you, the world can be put back together after all, the one world that you know is true.

Austin Grossman’s first novel,
Soon I Will Be Invincible
, was nominated for the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, and his writing has appeared in
Granta
,
The Wall Street Journal
, and
The New York Times
. He is a video game design consultant and a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of California at Berkeley, and he has written and designed for a number of critically acclaimed video games, including
Dishonored
,
Ultima Underworld II
,
System Shock
,
Trespasser
, and
Deus Ex
. His second novel,
You
, came out from Mulholland Books in 2012, and his short fiction has also appeared in John Joseph Adams’s anthologies
The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination
and
Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom
.

The instructor is intimidating enough—you know about his kill count, unmatched in Shuos history—but what strikes you as you enter the room is all the games.

Games are one of the Shuos faction’s major instructional tools. The Shuos specialize in information operations, although your particular training is as “Shuos infantry,” as the euphemism goes: assassination. You recognize most of the games that rest on the tables. A pattern-stone set with a knife scratch across its cloudwood surface, its two bowls of black and white stones glittering beneath the soft lights. Pegboards, counters, dice, darts.

There are less old-fashioned games, mediated by the computer grid. The harrowing strategic simulations from your last year of studies would have been prohibitively time-consuming otherwise. Here, the only evidence of computer aid is a map imaged above a corner of the instructor’s desk. It’s centered on the Citadel of Eyes, the star fortress that is Shuos headquarters, and the world it orbits, which you just came from. Shuos Academy’s campus is located planetside.

On the instructor’s desk rests a jeng-zai deck. A hand of middling value lies face-up next to several hexagonal tokens. You can’t help but look for the infamous Deuce of Gears, gold against a field of livid red, formerly the instructor’s emblem. But it’s said his years on the battlefield are behind him.

“Instructor,” you say without saluting—you’re not Kel military—although you feel the vast difference in your statures.

“Sit down,” the instructor says in a drawl. You almost expected
at ease
, based on the fact that he once served as an officer in the Kel army. Was, in many ways, their best general during the time he was loaned out to their service. The Kel, another of the realm’s factions, are sometimes allies and more usually rivals of the Shuos. The Shuos share the Kel interest in military matters, but the two factions often differ on how to intervene in the usual crises.

The instructor is not a tall man, although his build suggests a duelist’s lean strength. The Shuos uniform in ninefox red and gold looks incongruously bright on him after Kel black and gold, as does the topaz dangling from one ear. He asks, “You know how many of your class came here for advanced training?”

You recite the number. It’s not large. They didn’t say much about your assignment here. “Advanced training” covers a lot of ground. But you couldn’t escape the rumors; no one could.

The war has been going on for the past two decades. You know the names of the worlds the enemy claims they “liberated” from your realm’s oppressive rule, the military bases demolished by enemy swarms. And those were only the first to fall to the Taurag Republic. They won’t be the last.

This realm is a vast one: worlds upon worlds you’ve never heard of. Some have more strategic value than others. The Taurags care a great deal about what they call
honor
. They make a point of sparing civilian targets. But your people are still losing.

You tip your chin up and await details.

“We’ve learned of a new weapon,” the instructor says. “Preliminary analysis indicates that it can reach kill counts in excess of anything ever seen before. We’re looking for people with the flexibility of thought to handle the weapon’s capabilities.”

He taps something next to the map. Red markers flare up. You recognize their import: attacks on Shuos space, except there are more than you had known about.

“Yes,” the instructor says quietly. “The Taurags hurt us worse than we’ve led people to believe. Worse than the Taurags themselves know. I doubt they’ll be fooled for long. We have time to prepare for their next thrust, but not a lot of time.”

You indicate that you understand.

“The training begins now,” he says. “We’ll start with a straightforward game.” He smiles a tilted smile at you, knife-sweet.

Your heart is thudding painfully. The Kel, who knew him primarily as a soldier, might remember only his remarkable battle record. The Shuos know that beyond formations and guns, his inescapable kill count, he is also a master of games.

The instructor’s fingers flicker again. A new map, this one of a space station. It unfurls simultaneously in your mind through your augment, tapping your visual and kinesthetic senses. You orient yourself, then walk the unnamed station’s skin, probe it for vulnerabilities.

“The scenario,” he says. “This station has been targeted by Taurag sympathizers. Its population is ninety thousand people.”

Ninety thousand people. A pittance, from the viewpoint of an interstellar polity, yet each of those ninety thousand names is a shout in the darkness. The augment informs you that the station is instrumental to research of an unspecified nature. Impossible to avoid speculation: presumably the government is developing countermeasures, presumably it wants to protect its next superweapon.

The station has its own security, but the researchers can’t function if it locks down. They may be close to a key breakthrough. And there’s the old paradox: you can’t defend everything everywhere for an indefinite length of time without an infinite budget. Even then someone will devise some unexpected angle of attack.

“You’ve been dispatched to handle the threat,” the instructor continues. “Assume for the exercise’s sake that you’re loyal.” He grins at you, as unfunny as the joke is. “You have no such assurance about everyone else. Trust them or not, your call. You’ll have access to Shuos infantry gear.”

You’re surprised by his use of the euphemism. It’s not like he needs to worry about offending your sensibilities. The augment provides the list of available gear. The system asks you what you want to requisition, and you put in your requests.

“Any questions?”

This is a test in itself. “If the station falls,” you say, “how many will die? Beyond the ninety thousand?”

He raises an eyebrow. “The kill count is up to you, fledge. Go left out the door and follow the servitor. It’ll take you to the game room.”

There used to be a saying, which originated with the Kel, that no game could ever replicate the fear of death that accompanies real combat. It was a dig at the Shuos obsession with training games. After all, how could a simulation with numbers in a computer, with game boards and tokens, prepare you for the possibility that you’d have to sacrifice your life? The Kel and the Shuos often work together, especially during warfare, but that doesn’t mean they always get along.

Then Shuos Mikodez, head of the Shuos, assassinated two of his own cadets for reasons never divulged. Mikodez was the youngest Shuos to attain the head position in centuries. The people who doubted that he was ruthless enough to hold on to the seat suddenly became a minority. And over the next decades the Shuos prospered under Mikodez’s guidance.

The saying withered after that, not least among the Shuos themselves.

You follow the instructor’s directions exactly. Not to say that it’s always optimal, but your instincts tell you that this is not one of the exercises where they want you to play hooky. Once you’re outside, a spiderform servitor, all skittering angles and lens eyes, escorts you through the corridors.

Your first stop is to pick up your equipment. The weapons aren’t real, though the masks, armor, and medical supplies are. The former are marked with the horrific ninefox red that indicates that they’re simulation gear. The worst thing you could do to someone with the fake scorch pistol is break their nose with it. (Well. Not the worst thing. The worst
polite
thing.)

Next the servitor leads you to an unmarked elevator, although it doesn’t follow you in. From here you’re on your own. The elevator’s interior is decorated in sea green rather than the florid Shuos colors. There’s a shuddering sensation as it takes you through the Fortress’s levels, and then the doors whisk open.

The simulator is more advanced than the ones you’re accustomed to. You enter the designated sim chamber and hook yourself up to the monitors, heart pounding. You’ve never enjoyed the next part, where the augment overrides real sensory stimuli in favor of programmed ones. It’s a pity that you’re weighed down with the gear, but you’re expected to take your equipment seriously, and it comes with additional sensors to record everything.

Your senses jitter as the scenario calibrates itself to you; your old roommate described it as the sensation of your eyeballs turning inside out in a dark room. Then a garden replaces the simulator’s interior. Under other circumstances you’d appreciate the forsythia and the red-and-gold carp swirling lazily in a pond.

You spot eight people around you straight off—no, make that nine. The scenario dumped you into a vine-covered nook near an engineer complaining about a fungal infection to two people who look like they’re trying to think of excuses to be elsewhere. You have also been provided with an absurd tall glass of a lavender-orange beverage topped with iridescent foam. You hope it’s not based on anything real.

You need information, and it’d be nice to get access to the station grid. You have credentials appropriate to a low-level technician, which is what you’re pretending to be. You’re no grid-diver, but the point isn’t outsmarting the computers, it’s outsmarting the people the computers serve.

For the first hour—simulated time; you’re painfully aware that your internal clock has been screwed with—you circulate around the garden to get a sense for what’s going on. Not a bad insertion: stressed people gravitate toward gardens. You eavesdrop and learn that scoutmoth patrols have glimpsed ambiguous signals from the direction of the Taurag border. People are skittish.

It’s here that the game changes.

The augment has an alert for you:
Target active. Scenario timer engaged. Target’s kill count: 0.

As if agents get such certainty in real life. Still, that number won’t go down. Maybe they expect the counter to rattle you as it changes.

Time to move.

You dispose of the lavender-orange beverage without tasting it—you’re afraid of the scenario authors’ imagination already; what were they
thinking
?—and make your way toward Medical. It occupies one of the innermost levels. The people you pass talk about everything from debugging ecoscrubbers to failed affairs. There’s a discussion of ways to improve a recipe for honey sesame cookies. The banality of their concerns is almost enough to convince you that they’re real people. You’d even feel bad if you failed to save them.

You’re ambushed by a tall woman and a demure-looking alt in a quiet corridor on the way. Which is alarming, because clearly they knew you were coming. In the scenario’s context that can only be one thing: a warning. It’s impossible not to try to anticipate the scenario author’s intent for clues.

Twist and joint-lock and the quiet-loud crunch of bone. They’re down before you have time to panic over the implications, for which you’re grateful. One of them is still alive, which means that you can—

The alarm goes off. Not a scenario alarm—it’s impossible to graduate Academy without enduring at least one botched scenario—but a priority-one Citadel-wide alert. You only recognize it because of the briefing you received on the way to the Citadel. You assumed it was the standard orientation, although you memorized it as a matter of course, without expecting the information to become relevant during your training.

The inside-out-eyeball feeling recurs. The visuals, the sound, everything freezes. Worse is being dumped back into Citadel time without the usual precious moments of adjustment.

A databurst sears through the augment. Most of it’s too high-clearance for you. You’re informed that you’re authorized to know that there
is
an alert, but that’s all. Honestly, you’re impressed that Shuos bureaucrats have left something out of contingency planning. But sending newly graduated cadets to the Citadel itself for advanced training is a rare occurrence. You almost can’t blame them. Assuming this, too, isn’t a continuation of the scenario. You’re betting that’s what’s going on.

“Listen,” a voice says into your augment. It’s tense and rapid and—this makes your spine prickle—seems to be coming from outside the simulator. “The experienced infantry are elsewhere, so you’ll have to do. They haven’t cracked this channel yet; they’re focusing on high-priority shit like isolating Mikodez and the senior staff. I’ve updated your map with the current layout and given you the highest clearances I can without triggering the grid’s watchdog sweeps, which I think they’re monitoring. Get to Armory 15-2-5, grab some basic armaments. Link up with—”
Static.

They who?
“Requesting update on situation,” you say. For all you know, the damn scenario has crashed and the voice belongs to a completely different game. “I’m here for training, I don’t have access, I don’t know the situation.”

More static, swearing: “Look, this isn’t—” You tell yourself the voice’s tremor is a fiction. “Look, I don’t
do
this real-time shit, I’m in logistical analysis; I study
food
. You have to get out of there. There are hostile infantry running around and a squad on level fifteen is heading for the spatial stabilizer and I can’t raise local security, they might have been taken out,
please
—”

The voice drops out, no static this time, nothing. You wait for an interminable minute on the off chance that it will return. No luck.

You’ll play along. You manually kick the scenario. Your nerves flare with phantom pain as the simulator drops the inputs. You extricate yourself from the chamber, dumping all the red weaponry except the (dull) knife, which you could theoretically use to stick someone in the eye. Then you head for the armory by the most direct route, since speed is your ally.

Like most larger stations, the Citadel routinely uses variable layout, which allows spatial elements to be rearranged for more rapid travel between them. You worry that someone will switch variable layout off and leave you spindled between
here
and
nowhere
. The technology has an extremely good safety record—if you don’t take hostiles into account.