Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1)

by Jae Hill

  Some scattered applause crackled through the audience.

  “You will be placed in the neural interface for dozens of hours at a time—longer than you’ve ever been before. You’ll be catheterized, fed intravenously, and literally live inside the simulation. You will be taking the fight to the enemy as a warrior form, but without having to make that permanent transition. You will become the zombie slayers you’ve always imagined.”

  The room erupted in applause and cheers. For a room of hardcore gamers who loved even the Digibook and EagleVision versions of the game, getting to actually play the simulation against real zombies was a thrilling prospect. When it quieted down, Major Walling asked bluntly:

  “Questions?”

  At first, the room was silent. A tiny hand of a girl, barely ten years old, was the first to go up.

  “Why children instead of enhanced forms?” she asked.

  “You’re the best for the job,” Major Walling chuckled, which netted some cheers from around the room. “We have your neural interfaces on file and know you can operate the machines. We have your scores from the Slayers game and we know you’re talented. And finally, adult enhanced forms can’t use the interface in the way you can, nor can the implanted warrior forms operate a machine other than the one they reside in. Our top scientists are looking for software patches to the biologic problems we’re facing with ‘bouncing’ paired organic brains from one robotic form to the next. It simply can’t be done with existing programming at this time, and a solution may be months away— time which we do not have.

  “Any other questions?”

  One more hand raised up as a teenage boy spoke.

  “Is there a threat to us for being in the interface? Can we die in the machines?”

  Major Walling shook her head, “No, no. You will feel pain; you have to if you want to know you’re being hit. But it’s not enough to die from, as the simulation numbs what you would experience to a tenth of what you would actually feel.”

  The marshal took the stage again and ordered the dismissal of the “troops,” with the expectation that they would be in the makeshift cafeteria for breakfast at 0600 and then in the tubes at 0700 for a long day of war games.

  Burnham’s cadre and technical staff from Luna had been busy building the simulations. They used real-world elevation and imagery data to recreate the area around Colorado Springs. During these iterations of training, the children wouldn’t be operating actual warrior forms, but would instead be working in a virtual reality system. Whereas the Slayers game used augmented reality to overlay digital objects on actual space, this VR system replaced reality entirely, and it was hyperrealistic to reflect the accuracy of the sensors of the warriors we’d be piloting.

  We went “into the tubes” at 0700 as expected, but the technicians had never tried to link four hundred operators at a time before. There were technical snags getting kids into the tubes, and glitches in the software when trying to dump all of the users into one instance. We shut down for an hour but were forced to stay in our metal coffins while the techs tried to solve the problem. One of the kids, Cyrus Dooley, suggested that they just load smaller instances in the meantime.

  He’d later become one of my company commanders.

  Finally, we were back into the system, loading in groups of sixty to seventy. We ran the simulations over and over and over. It was fun, but toward the end of the day, performance of the pilots was down.

  We exited the tubes at 1708. That was a long day. With all the sensor electrodes, catheters, and intravenous drips that had to be stuck into us, it didn’t make sense to have short training days. We’d have tomorrow off from the simulation, while the techs figured out the integration issues.

  An entire apartment block had been reserved for the out-of-town recruits, just across the street from the BRF, but I still had my apartment in the tower a few blocks away. It was a short five-minute walk back to my place, and I arrived home to a lovely dinner on the table prepared by Rebekah.

  As we ate a dinner of braised chicken, the lights of the city twinkled and glowed outside the window of the dining room. I could barely make out the distant flicker of lights of Old Vancouver on the horizon.

  “You look really tired,” Rebekah said in between bites.

  “I’m exhausted,” I said. “It’s not real inside the computer, but it’s made to feel so real that it actually wears out your muscles and your mind.”

  “It sounds like fun,” she hinted.

  “I wish you could join us, babe,” I said, swallowing the saucy food, “but every one of these kids has incredible experience with both the game and the remote system. It would take you a long time to get used to it. It’s taken years for most of these kids.”

  She frowned.

  “I’ll tell you what we can do: let’s go play Slayers tonight. Out in the city.”

  Suddenly, she was smiling.

  We finished dinner and put the dishes in the dishwasher—a device Rebekah now swore would never get her to leave the capital. We had a short walk to the electronics store where I picked up a standalone EagleVision headset for Rebekah. It had less general functionality than using the paired headsets that went with the digibooks, but it was also a lot more immersive and didn’t require carrying anything else to play the game.

  She put the gloves on her hands, attached the wireless sensors to her shoes, then placed the headset over her eyes…and started giggling. I remembered the first time, so many years ago, that I’d first wore mine, and felt the same giddiness.

  Rebekah kept looking around, reaching out with her hand to touch the things that she knew weren’t there. Occasionally, she’d pull the glasses away from her head just to compare the difference between the real world and the augmented world.

  We walked to a tea shop around the corner to start a beginner’s quest line. After learning how to move her hands to select items on the screen, she completed the gestures tutorial. By squeezing her hand into a fist, she could punch the imaginary zombies. By making a gun with a finger and a thumb, her hand turned into a digital pistol on the display. Two fingers brought up a machine gun. Her whole hand brought up the rocket launcher. This simple act entertained her for an hour. I watched through my display as her hand turned into a gun, then a rocket launcher, and so on. We completed a few small “numbers” quests where we had to shoot a predetermined number of zombies in a certain time period.

  She smiled ear-to-ear. “What else can we do?”

  I figured it was time for a warrior quest line. The augmented display wrapped your body in a wireframe warrior form, so when others looked at you, it appeared that you were actually inside the robot. When your hands moved, the robot’s hands moved. When you walked, it walked.

  Rebekah followed my instructions and “got inside” her robot. When I did the same, she screamed and ripped off her headset.

  I took mine off and saw her crying. Panting. Gasping in between sobs. I asked her what was wrong and tried to put my arms around her. She shoved me, then ripped off the gloves and sensors and ran off.

  I picked up her things and sat on a bench on the street, under the streetlight. Some moths swirled around it high above my head, casting shadows under the moonless Pacific sky.

  At least half an hour had gone by when she came sulking back.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Those things. They…they killed my family.”

  “But they saved us, remember?” I countered, reaching for her hand. “They pulled us out of Omaha.”

  “Pax,” she sniffled, “my whole family. Everyone I had left.”

  “They were defending the border,” I said. “I know it’s terrible. But you know what we’re up against now. They can’t take any chances.”

  “They know,” she snapped. “They know the difference between zombies and people. They just lump everyone together to make it easier to murder them.”

  I couldn’t argue. We’d been taught that everyone east of the mountains was a zombie: some were more
vicious, and some were more tame, but all of them were space-god worshipping savages who wanted nothing but to kill us all.

  “I can’t apologize for them,” I sighed. “I didn’t do that. I was almost killed along with you. But you can’t say that if you saw an enemy coming that you wouldn’t kill first and ask questions later. In fact,” I continued, “I know you would. You have.”

  Both of our minds were in the same place now— where she’d smashed that man’s head in with a rock on the way up to Beartooth Pass.

  “It still hurts,” she grumbled. “At least you still have your family.”

  I had nothing else to say, so I just pulled her close to me on the bench and held her until I started getting so tired I could hardly keep my eyes open. She was snoring softly and fast asleep on my shoulder, tucked close to my body. I lifted her up, cradled her in my arms, and carried her back to our apartment.

  In the morning, I ate breakfast in the cafeteria with the other recruits. I had already started selecting my company commanders and squad leaders based on their aptitude, leadership, and personality. Cyrus Dooley was a natural leader, probably even better than me. Definitely better than me. Morgana Dell, who had been training to be a pilot since she was a child, had amazing reflexes and an uncanny ability to outrun and outmove her opponents. She was always one of the last ones standing. Kaelis Richardson was another phenomenal player and had won the regional Slayers championship this year. I learned who I could trust, and who others would trust. I’d have to delegate a lot of combat ops, but fortunately, I’d have a crack team of strategists and operators calling the shots from up above.

  This day was spent almost entirely in the main assembly hall, with a few breakout sessions in the classrooms on specific tactics or commands. We detailed the strengths and weaknesses of the warrior forms with diagrams. It wasn’t particularly exciting, and many of the kids were bored until we showed combat footage clips from Omaha and a few other incursions.

  It was strange watching myself on video, being pulled out of the cage with Rebekah and hoisted into the hovering dropship. Then I saw something on one of the films that made me ill: a destroyed warrior form with the tag number AG842 on its shoulder.

  Adara Goodman.

  She had given her life for me and I’d hardly thought about her since then. Occasionally, I wandered back to memories of us as kids, but never of her at the battle. I guess it was because I only anecdotally knew she was there.

  The last of the combat camera clips from the warriors finished, and then the final segment showed the front of the starship Paradise Falls. The MAC gun fired and the camera shuddered as the multi-ton iron projectile blasted into the ruins of Omaha, which disappeared under a cloud of dust and debris that blocked the scene. The camera angle remained transfixed on the site and the video went to time lapse, speeding up, then slowing down as the dust cleared a day later. Nothing was left…just a giant crater one kilometer across, with the ruined buildings blown to rubble for another two clicks to either side.

  The faces of the crowd had gone from bored to awestruck. The ones that weren’t staring at the otherworldly images on the screen were staring at me.

  GAME ETIQUETTE

  “Again!” I screamed into the headset.

  The techs had figured out the integration problem, which was just a matter of bandwidth, and had all four hundred recruits in the system on the next day. The loading process had gone more quickly and more smoothly on day three. The technical kinks and glitches had been fixed.

  But goddamn it, was this a mess.

  The kids were so excited to be on this huge battlefield with all four hundred simulated drones that they were ignoring orders. They broke the lines. They killed each other for fun. It was chaos.

  The techs restarted the simulation and all the kids were loaded into the VR world again. I stood facing four hundred robots on the top of a hill, with a hundred thousand zombies of all shapes and sizes just a few hundred meters behind me.

  “Operator,” I said, selecting a secure channel, “lock their ‘bots please. No weapons or movement.”

  “Copy, Commander,” replied a tinny female voice.

  No one moved all across the line.

  Back to the broadcast channel, I spoke, “This isn’t just a game. This is real. We’re going to be fighting real enemies who really want to come here to kill the real you. If we can’t work together as a single unit, we’re going to be destroyed. One weak thread in the sweater is enough to unravel it. Now, we’re going to screw around for one more round and have fun and be silly, but after that, we’re buckling down. There’s a line of kids who would love to have your front-row seat to this battle, and if you can’t pull it together, you’re out of here.”

  I paused to let that sink in. No one responded.

  “If you understand and accept these terms, switch your comm channel to ‘receive only’, and your robot will unlock. If you aren’t going to play nicely, simply say ‘operator’ and someone will come pull you out of your tube and send you home.”

  Slowly the bots started moving. Eventually all of them.

  “Okay, let’s have some fun,” I chuckled, lobbing a grenade into the cluster of warriors and staring a ruckus that lasted for an hour. Then we rebooted and began the serious work of turning into a fighting force.

  We left the tubes just after 1800. The sun had already set. The stars were obscured by the clouds, but the moonglow could be faintly seen in the sky. I sat on the stairs outside the BRF as one of the marshal’s cadre came over and sat down next to me.

  “You did good work in there, today,” he said.

  “Thanks, Major Gaspar,” I sighed. “It’s like herding cats.”

  “It’s herding children, which is much more difficult,” he laughed. “When we train Fleet officers, they’ve already undergone the transformation and lose the defiance that comes with an organic body.”

  Gaspar patted me on the shoulder. “I don’t envy the work you’ve got, but I admire the job you’re doing.”

  “Why me?” I asked him. “Why would they have a boy do this when you’ve got an entire Fleet full of officers? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense. Like I said: we don’t know how to work with organics,” he replied. “At least not like other organics do. The marshal saw something in you. Your willingness to rush to the distant lands despite the perils. Your loyalty. Your passion. People like you come along pretty infrequently, and despite our reliance on the transformation, I think the surgery saps a lot of those admirable characteristics out of people.”

  He stood up, saluted, and walked off.

  Over his shoulder, the Major said, “True leadership comes from somewhere other than your brain.”

  I puzzled over that for a few minutes, then strolled back to my apartment. A few other recruits shuffled down the streets, their eyes bleary from another day spent in the simulation. I wasn’t even thinking now…just blank.

  I got off the mag-lift on the fifteenth floor and pressed my finger to the pad next to the door.

  It opened, and the rush of fragrant spices flowed through the door. Rebekah had clearly made something spicy for dinner and it smelled glorious. The table was set, but no one was there. I heard familiar voices from the living room.

  “Pax!” my dad shouted.

  I walked in to see Rebekah, dressed in a sleek, modern-style dress and high-heeled boots, entertaining my parents. Mom and Dad got up and each gave me a hug. Rebekah kissed me tenderly.

  “What are you guys doing here?” I asked.

  “Rebekah called us and asked if we wanted to join you for dinner,” Mom replied.

  I looked at Rebekah, hoping she remembered they couldn’t eat food.

  As if reading my mind, Dad said, “It’s okay, Pax. Rebekah was very polite. And these spicy smells…ahh! So wonderful. It almost makes me hungry!”

  “Dinner’s ready,” Rebekah announced. “We were just waiting for you.”

  She led me by the hand into
the dining room where we sat at the table. Some candles were already lit, illuminating the dimly lit dining room. Rebekah scurried into the kitchen and returned with steaming bowls of red soup.

  “It’s called ‘chili’, hun,” she smiled, pouring small bowls for my parents who sniffed and smelled.

  “Hunger is a two-way communication,” Mom said, “between the brain and the stomach. In the absence of stomachs, our brains simply trigger the bodies to release tiny bits of chemicals and nutrients. It gives us the slightest sensation of eating and being full. Brain trickery.”

  “That’s a lovely dress, Rebekah,” I said, eyeballing the tight grey material while trying to make the conversation a bit less awkward.

  “Your mom and I went shopping,” Rebekah smiled. “Juno picked it out for me. I love it!”

  I hardly ever heard my mom’s name. It was a bit weird.

  “Nice job, Mom.”

  “Thanks, sweetheart,” Mom replied.

  It was a dinner of polite conversation and old stories. Of how my parents met. Of Rebekah’s life in Great Falls before her father was called to serve the fledgling Montana Corps at the Battle of Highway Bridge. Of her life with her grandparents. Of my dad’s journey to Arturia where he found the first organic life-forms outside of Earth.

  Then they wanted to hear about my day and how things were going at the BRF. I didn’t want to talk about it. I was mentally and physically drained.

  When dinner had been thoroughly consumed, we cleaned up and then sat on the balcony. Rebekah brought two glasses out and handed me one. It definitely smelled of Ebenezer’s rum mixed with berries. With the berries mixed in, I barely noticed the harsh taste of the alcohol.

  Dad sniffed the air and then laughed. He knew what we were drinking. My dad was full of stories he never shared, and I hoped one day I’d learn about his antics with alcohol.

  We laughed and talked and watched the clouds break. The stars shone for the first time in weeks. Dad pointed to a few places in the sky…distant dots of light that he’d visited with tiny little rocks orbiting them. He pointed out which of those distant planets now had either enhanced or organic humans living on them.