Waypoint: A Game of Drones

by C. F. WALLER

  I track him out into the mob. A few feet from the display, he runs into a half dozen other fanboys and falls into their group. I follow for a few minutes, then give up, stepping out of traffic to catch my breath. This was a stupid idea. I pull out the phone and dial Hal, but when I put the phone to my ear, the guy is a few feet away watching me. He’s flanked by a gal in red and white stripped leggings and a tube top. A third guy, dressed like a Viking flanks her. The girl has a ring in her lip and enough eyeliner and purple shadow to qualify as a Halloween costume contestant.

  “Hey there,” I mutter, snapping the phone shut.

  “She wants to know about Dynasty Builder,” he points at me, half shouting over the crowd noise.

  “I was actually looking for Elliott—.”

  “What do you want to know?” the girl grunts, hands on her ample hips. “Last new version released in 2003.”

  “You play it?”

  “Are you serious?” the Viking blurts, pointing at the girl, who the longer I look at, the older she seems. “Kara was the World Champ.”

  “Of Dynasty Builder?” I clarify, unaware they awarded such a title.

  “Dynasty Builder, Simulation Deep Space and Colonize Mars,” Viking boasts. “She’s a legendary advocate of kicking butt.”

  Kara uses both hands to hike up her tube top and shrugs. Her hair is pink with bleached pig tails. She alternates between staring at me, then her combat boots. I wish I had known about E3 earlier in my life. I’m the frigging prom queen here.

  “I met Elliot Weiss once,” she offers. “He presented the trophy and they took a picture of us back in 2003.”

  “Would you have a minute to answer some questions?” I ask loudly over the din of a sudden burst of simulated gunfire.

  “What’s in it for us?” Viking demands, but is cut down by a severe glare from his queen.

  “How about we get out of here and go somewhere with less war sounds?” I suggest, stepping closer. “I could spring for dinner?”

  “Okay,” she stammers, then looks at the scolded Viking. “Barry and Ray can come though, right?”

  “Absolutely,” I force a smile and wave toward the front exit. “The more, the merrier.”

  …

  Kara licks hot fudge off the elongated spoon provided with her Big Kahuna Sundae. How she managed to eat the entire mountain of ice-cream is a mystery, but she slapped the Viking, who she calls Ragnar, when he tried to share it. I sip my coffee and watch her two man posse play video golf on a console in the back of the ice cream shop. High fives and sharp tonged taunts are fired back and forth as they battle it out. I simply don’t understand the allure of video games. Kara drops the spoon into the glass trough with a clink, then runs her tongue over black lipstick.

  “How old are you really?” I ask.

  “Rude question.”

  “Thirty-eight?”

  “Yeah, right,” she protests. “Twenty-eight.”

  I stare over my coffee cup, returning her Yeah, Right expression.

  “Fine, thirty.”

  “If you say so,” I shake my head, thinking she’s at least five years too low. “Tell me about Dynasty Builder.”

  “It’s a simulation. The player starts out as a random caveman,” she offers, then frowns. “Or cavewoman. In either case, you have to build a civilization from scratch.”

  “What year did you say you played?”

  “Ha,” she snorts. “I have played every version since the first release.”

  “When was that?”

  “Eighty-nine,” she admits, inadvertently tossing her claim to being thirty into the dumpster.

  “Is it still around?”

  She shakes her head, fidgeting in her seat.

  “Why’d they stop making it?”

  “The A. I. sucked,” she grunts, picking fudge off her lip ring.

  “The A. I.?”

  “Yeah, the gamer plays as one civilization, say the Romans,” she explains. “There are always five total, so the A. I. controls the rest.”

  “When you say A. I. you mean computer players? The other four civilizations are just computer generated.”

  “Yeah, and it sucked.”

  “Could you possibly expand on that? In what specific way did it suck?”

  “To start with, it was predictable. It’s no fun to play if you already know what your opponent is going to do wrong,” she complains, putting her hand to the side of her head, as if it was a gun, then pretending to blow her head off. “Also, it didn’t do obvious things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Okay,” she mumbles, looking at the ceiling for a moment. “How to explain it to a newb?”

  “Use small words.”

  “Might not help,” she pauses, raising an eyebrow. “Try this example; in the game, you have different units. These might be army guys or boats or planes. When you put three similar units on one space, you can combine them. Then you have one unit, called a battalion, and it’s exponentially more powerful.”

  “And the computer players didn’t do this?”

  “Rarely, it was totally lame,” she shakes her head. “There’s tons of other stuff, but in the long run you got tired of playing against a few lines of looped code.”

  “And yet, it was a very popular game for over a decade,” I point out. “What changed?”

  “Other games got more exciting. Graphics improved and gamers got hooked on the visuals.”

  “You indicated the demise was due to a poor A.I., not graphics?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she scowls. “Lots you don’t know about games. You ever play Demo-Crush?”

  “That’s the one where you crash into the other cars?” I ask, thinking I watched two kids playing a new version on a ten foot wall screen earlier in the day.

  “Right, lots of crashes and explosions. At the end, a grand total screen shows how many total hits for each car and a Mad Dog award for the hardest hits.”

  “Okay?”

  “To the player, it looks like the game kept track of every hit, right down to speed and direction of the cars, but it can’t. The game code isn’t that good. To write a program to track all of that would take up way too much space.”

  “So, how do they do it?”

  “They don’t,” she scowls, as if this was an unconscionable mistruth. “All the stats are just random numbers. All they keep track of is win, place and show. The entire illusion is created by a random number generator that takes six lines of code, instead of sixty thousand.”

  “And, on Dynasty Builder they just faked the outcomes?”

  “Yes, in very predictable ways. Before games became so polished and complex that was okay, but not now. At this point, if it’s not an open world console game, it’s relegated to the bargain bin.”

  “The original Dynasty Builder was a PC game,” I verify, assuming it was played on lap tops or towers. “Everything I saw at E3 was on an Xbox or a PlayStation.”

  “Once consoles mastered online gaming, they ruled the world. People want to play other people, not machines.”

  “What year were you the Champion?”

  “2003,” she bobs her head proudly. “It was held at the MGM Grand in Vegas. I won ten thousand dollars and got a tour of the Dyna-Motion Corporate Head Quarters in Napa.”

  “Insurrection used to be called Dyna-Motion?” I mutter, recalling the name change from Hal’s paperwork.

  “Yeah, when they changed names, they dropped a lot of games, including Dynasty Builder. It’s a shame too. The last beta I played was insane.”

  “The last beta?”

  “Uh-huh. I won in 2003 and got to meet some of the programmers. Six months later, I get a Fed-Ex envelope with a crap-load of CD’s inside. It was an early version of Dynasty Builder that they were planning on releasing later that year. They were calling it Dynasty Evolved. It was unbelievable when it didn’t crash.”

  “Crash?”

  “Yeah, you couldn’t finish a game because it would slow down, then lock
up your laptop.”

  “But, it was good,” I verify. “The A. I. was good?”

  “Better than good,” she perks up. “Good is Fall Out Boy playing the Wichita County Fair. This was more like Taylor Swift playing live at your birthday party good.”

  “Taylor Swift?”

  “Shut up,” she barks, crossing her arms over her chest.

  “You were talking about Dynasty Evolved?”

  “Yeah, the other civilizations’ leaders actually talked to the gamer and each other. I played it for two weeks and never got any sort of a handle on the strategy. Not to mention that the game remembered every player and every move they ever made. I even tried uninstalling the game, then reloading and starting a new game. The frigging thing remembered my previous moves, even after the reset.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Good question,” she snorts, picking at her lip ring. “My personal opinion is that it was impossible to uninstall.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I think when you tried to uninstall the program it took evasive action. It must have created a backup of itself and then hid it on my hard-drive.”

  “To what end? Can a program just re-install itself?”

  “My hard drive wasn’t big enough to hide a file that large, but on a bigger machine maybe. Possibly, it never uninstalled at all. It’s not like your computer ever technically deletes anything.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ugh,” she groans. “How did I wind up teaching Rudimentary Computers 101?”

  “Sorry, just humor me a little bit longer. What doesn’t the computer delete?”

  “You can drag something into the trash, but the lines of code that make up the file aren’t erased. The filing system just forgets where it’s stored.”

  “Come again?”

  “Imagine a library,” she sighs, weary of the things I do not know. “You go in to check out a book.”

  “Okay?”

  “What book do you want to read?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes, what book?”

  “Harry Potter,” I toss out, unable to think of anything more substantial.

  “Which one?”

  “Seriously?” I groan. “Is that crucial to this example?”

  “No, but you can tell a lot about a person by which one they choose.”

  “Fine, Chamber of Secrets,” I offer, unable to recall more than three titles.

  She frowns, twisting her face to one side in a very judgmental way.

  “Okay, which one do you like?”

  “Goblet of Fire,” she announces, thrumming her fingers on the table. “The hot guy from Twilight was in it. Cedric Diggory, oh, la, la.”

  “Okay, that’s an over share. You were making an analogy between computers and libraries.”

  “I was. So, you go into the library and try to look up the location of Chamber of Secrets in the card file.”

  “Card file?”

  “Yeah, the old Dewy Decimal System. I know you’re old enough to remember that.”

  I take a deep breath, ignoring the jab, and wave for her to move forward.

  “But the card’s missing.”

  “I just go to the fiction section and search for Rowling alphabetically.”

  “In this library, the books are on shelves in a random way. Imagine if you shuffled the Library of Congress and then tossed out the table of contents.”

  “So, you’re saying nothing is ever deleted?”

  “That’s not a hundred percent true either,” she wobbles her head from side to side. “Things can be written over or reformatted, but until then, it’s just the location that’s deleted.”

  “So, you think the game files that stored your previous moves remained hidden on the hard drive?”

  She nods, then shrugs, then sighs. I desperately want to slap her, but still have too many questions. She’s very bright, but apparently doing nothing with it.

  “Why didn’t they release it? Too hard to fix the bugs?”

  “For starters, it took a dozen CD’s just to load it. You needed a few terabytes of disk space because the darn thing expanded after it installed.”

  “Expanded? You mean like a compressed zip file?”

  “Yes, and it was huge. Not to mention this was 2004. Back in the day, a 500 gigabyte drive was massive. I’d guess you needed a terabyte minimum, just to get the thing to open.”

  “But you had a terra-whatever?”

  “I had just won ten-thousand dollars,” she smirks. “I had a custom ordered Alien-Ware Box. Although I had to chain it to a server to load Dynasty Evolved.”

  “But they never released it?”

  “Nah, they rat canned Weiss and dropped a bunch of games.”

  “He didn’t just turn up somewhere else?”

  She shrugs and tugs at her tube top. I already know he’s a ghost after 2004, but I don’t want to assume anything. Her two followers drift back and crowd in on her side. Kara won ten-grand playing a video game at the same time I was married and living the military wife life. That would have been a lot of money to our little family. Would that sort of money change the outcome of our tragic story? Would my loved ones still be here?

  “We done?” Kara asks, interrupting my day dream.

  “Yeah, can we exchange numbers in case I think of anything else?”

  “I’ll give you my number,” the Viking blurts, pulling out his cell. “Hashtag, you’re lucky day.”

  Kara scowls at him, mouthing the word GROSS under her breath. Are they a couple, or is she trying to stay the center of their little nerd pile?

  “What’s your number?” Kara sighs as if it’s a huge sacrifice on her part.

  “Excellent question,” I mutter, pulling out my phone.

  “How old is that,” Viking laughs. “Did it come with wrap-around shades?”

  “Funny, but not original. I’m not sure of the number, give me yours and I’ll call you.”

  Kara pulls a business card from some spot of her person, then slides out and plows to the doors, her knee length skirt swishing as she moves. Her loyal followers form up behind her and march in unison. Her business card is dark purple, featuring a gothic rag doll with crosses for eyes. There’s an email and a phone number, but no name. I’ll give her credit for confidence. I should have asked what she does for a living. Her life has to be going better than mine. I’m getting ready to call Kara’s phone when mine rings. It’s Hal and I have a sip of coffee before accepting.

  “Talk to me.”

  “Find anything on our boy?” he asks.

  “Sort of, but I don’t think he’s physically here.”

  “Not surprising. One of my guys is about to pick you up. We have bigger problems than Elliott Weiss.”

  “Those problems being?”

  “The Tesla Drone isn’t a secret anymore. It turned up in Florida.”

  “Turned up?”

  “Took control of a commercial flight full of innocent people.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s remote flying a United flight in a holding pattern over Cape Canaveral.”

  “Like NASA, Cape Canaveral?”

  “Yeah, and to make matters worse Space-X happens to be launching something today. It’s headline on CNN and every other network.”

  “Why don’t you shoot it down? Cut to the chase already.”

  “With what?”

  “Scramble some jets and blow it out of the sky. Do some of that Top Gun stuff the USA is famous for.”

  “It just remote hijacked a United triple-seven and is flying it up and down the Cape. I’m not looking make this situation any worse by handing over control of two fighter jets loaded with air-to-air missiles.”

  “You make a good point,” I agree, recalling the hacked Chinese jets. “Can’t you just shoot it down from something land based?”

  “We could, but it’s invisible?”

  “Invisible,” I laugh. “Like Wonder Woman’s plane?”
/>
  “In a way. It won’t show up on anything we can target. If it were that easy we would have put an end to this years ago.”

  This makes sense, although a commercial flight full of everyday people might be an excellent reason not to shoot at the guy holding the remote control. What is going on here?

  “So, what now?”

  Two guys in suits push in the double doors and scan the room. The first guy peels off his sunglasses, then points, curling a finger for me to join him.

  “Your Agents just walked in. Where am I going now?”

  “Florida, you might as well join me for this debacle.

  “I’d prefer not to fly United.”

  “My plane this time. If this doesn’t sort itself out quickly, the President might ground every plane in the sky.”

  “That’s pretty drastic.”

  “Not since 911,” he replies solemnly. “See you soon.”

  The call ends and I leave a few bucks tip before joining the real-life Stormtroopers at the door. On the sidewalk, Kara and her minions wait for a bus. When I pass with the two suits, the Viking nods and wags a finger.

  “Have fun with Agent Smith.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Would you like more coffee?” the cook asks.

  “Why not?” I grumble, spinning on my stool and nudging my mug to his side of the counter.

  There are two guys in white aprons and fifties-style white hats cooking breakfast behind a red and white checkered counter top. Two gals in similar get-ups squeeze between crowded tables filling water glasses and shagging up dirty plates. Raymond, according to his nametag, fills my coffee from a brown handled glass carafe.

  “Wasn’t sure how long you were staying,” he mutters, eyes on a patron down the way waving a hand.

  This is an excellent question. We took off from LAX and got as far as the gulf coast of Florida before the President grounded everything south of Tennessee and east of Louisiana. It seems like overkill given the Tesla drone is currently in Florida, but then again, it’s not my butt on the line if people start falling out of the sky.

  Venice is a small airport, there isn’t even a tower. To land, we had to wait in line with a dozen tiny Cessnas all circling one of the two runways. It’s really more like a roadside diner, except the parking lot is full of privately owned planes, not cars. It never dawned on me how many private citizens owned their own aircraft. Our Gulfstream looks odd, parked among a litany of less complicated flying machines.