Gamer (Gamer Trilogy)

by Christopher Skliros

  Poison ivy.

  I blacked out – water still rising.

  8

  TECH

  * * * I glanced furtively at Xander who sat directly opposite me; his glare was as intense as it had been fifteen minutes ago. His expression was one of somebody who had lost everything and I knew that I had been the cause of his resent.

  “Xander!” the reporter chimed. “Obviously you know this man we have just brought in,” the camera swivelled to focus on me. “Talk to me about what, er,” the interviewer paused for a second, going over what seemed to be an error in her notes, “Tech,” she said with little certainty, “has done to you.”

  Xander flushed with anger, his expression becoming more intense. He looked like a bull about to charge.

  Without warning, he stood up out of his seat – and even though he was still only a teenager, I shrank back, scared about what he might do.

  He spat on the floor in front of my feet.

  Silence.

  He sat back down, still glaring.

  The “Xander” I had put into the Simulator was no longer the same person. He had been changed – for better or for worse.

  The interviewer was in a state of shock and then quickly revising her next course of action, she moved onto questioning me.

  “Begin from the beginning, please.” She seemed to dislike me already. “We want to know who you are so that we can attempt to justify why you did what you did… Talk to us, Tech – who are you?”

  And so I began.

  * * *

  I drummed my fingers nervously on the aluminium tabletop. Watching the Testees in Simulator, I couldn’t help but be

  reminded of my own time at Elitus. It was many years ago when I walked through the gates of the Academy, not knowing that I would never leave them again. I had an interview scheduled with the headhunters here and they were impressed enough by what I had achieved already by that stage, that they offered me a position.

  I remembered the buildings, the majority of them still the same. The people who had been in my year level – all of them just as scheming and self-glorifying as the kids on the screen in front of me and I remembered how happy I was when I was finally finished.

  Out of all the Testees, I had to admit that I was most like B3ast: one of those kids who liked to sit in the corner, building scale-model aeroplanes and talking to myself. I didn’t have friends when I was in school and even now, I only had contact with other people when I was forced to.

  Social defects aside, I was talented. I had been gifted by the universe with eidetic memory. It was both a blessing and a curse.

  Possessing perfect recall, to the point where it was possible for me to remember whether or not one’s shoelaces had aglets, from any specific minute in my life since the age of two, was astounding to most people. It was one of the things that got me a spot at the Academy.

  When I applied I was aged eleven and by the time I began, I was twelve – I was sent out of home on my birthday.

  My own parents never wanted me; well they wanted my fame – but not me. In the first place, they had never wanted children and yet when they surrendered themselves to the fact that I was coming along, my mother had prayed for a girl. From before I was even born, I had failed them.

  My calling to Elitus was a godsend of them. They jumped at the chance to have me shipped off - the less hassle I was to them, the better.

  Not only was my leaving what they wanted, but my success was also something that their livelihood’s relied upon. Me going to Elitus affirmed my status as an elite individual in whatever career path I chose - something they believed would make it easier for me to buy them a mansion when I graduated. Sending me away and getting paid to do it Elitus was what they called a “win-win”.

  From when I was young, my dad was an alcoholic and my mother was a smoker. Between the two of them we didn’t have enough money to even buy groceries, so it was easy to see how going to Elitus was also a relief for them.

  While I was here, though, I resented every minute. If a girl like Stefanie didn’t like you, then neither did any of her friends

  – or their friends. I was a loner that only found company in making things. And that was the only thing Elitus ever did for me – give me an engineering lab.

  I spent every spare minute out of class at the dome-building, both getting away from everybody else and trying to learn about absolutely anything I could. One of the engineering instructors used to even come in and check on me every now and then - he was one of the very few people that ever showed any interest in me. With him, I took my talent further and being able to remember absolutely every manual I’d ever read

  – I dedicated my time in the lab to constructing tiny models that simulated real-life ecosystems.

  One thing led to another and from feeble holograms to fourdimensional simulations, I came up with the idea of Simulator.

  After I graduated I spent a few more years on campus practically living in that laboratory - and with a stroke of luck, I managed to land some funding for the Simulator project.

  Between that and trying to put together a team of workers, three years later here I was – seated in front of the world’s only simulator powered by artificial intelligence and the most efficient data processers in the world.

  When I stood in that room and sent them into the game, I knew billions of dollars were on my horizon.

  Now, as I sat in my favourite electronic massage chair, directly opposite the wall-sized screen, I watched Grace sprint to the forest, still unsteady from her confrontation with Alexander. She looked furious that she’d lost him.

  The door on the furthest side on the room, bearing the number three slid open.

  “Master,” a stout, pock-marked, four-eyed scientist stumbled in, “everything seems to be going to plan.” He gave a snort of derisive laughter.

  He was Number 1, the first and most experienced of my three-member-strong mercenary team of engineers. The circumstances under which I acquired him were peculiar indeed but simply by the virtue of the fact he often had no idea what day it was and at the same time was quite a good programmer, he was easy to control as well as skilled – someone very valuable to me.

  I blinked several times, realising he was still there. “Thank you for that, 1, now go get the others – we have a promo to make.”

  He did a half-jump of joy and left the room at an eager pace. He was totally and completely my minion – without me he’d literally be nobody - I gave him his very name.

  Half a minute later, the doors slid open again, and in came 1, followed by 2 and 3 – the rest of my team.

  2 was just as oblivious as 1, easily controlled and desperate for my approval. He had come from some institution like Lily’s. For every minute he wasn’t being punished, he saw life as a blessing, and so he was more than willing to do whatever it took to ensure his place at my side as well.

  3 on the other hand, was a bit of a different case. He took a while to subdue. Room 4 wasn’t an unfamiliar place to him… He was one of the actual students to first trial Simulator – and he was the only one that made it out with his mind intact

  – well close enough anyway.

  That was the one obstacle that kept coming back to bite me in the backside – the first trial.

  It was two years ago and Simulator, at the time, had only been worked on for a year or so. More or less, it was pronounced ready. Everything was in working order and all was good. The first trial had also taken place at Elitus. Six students, much like the ones in Simulator at the moment, all entered with the intent of being the ultimate survivor and walking away with the satisfaction that they were the wittiest, strongest and most proficient student in the entire school. The Omega wasn’t part of the prize back then – this time around I had to buy it off the school – but the chance to be the first person in the world with a Simulator was.

  With a little bit of endorsement from the school, of which an internship with “the brightest young engineer in the cou
ntry, who graduated from Elitus himself” was offered, quite a few students were more than excited to sign up.

  The six that qualified were, as always, hand-picked by the school’s leadership, and at 8AM on the following Saturday, they reported to the hall where the stations and goggles were set up.

  I remembered it as if it was yesterday, they all put on their goggles – there was no weapon selection then – and were all wearing their blue nylon suits – the uniform at the time that was needed to run the Simulator – and after the half an hour of diagnostic tests, they were ready to go.

  We hadn’t managed to rig the entire lab, as we did this time around, to give the effect of a simulated environment. Also their suits, which we didn’t have this time around, allowed us to track them on a map as well as measure their heart-rates and body temperatures. Since then, we’d condensed all that technology into the goggles alone.

  As they entered the game, everything was going to plan and for the first couple of hours, we watched them, in a less-thanperfect television image, make friends and enemies of one another.

  But then everything went wrong.

  The image on our screen went out, their positions on our map were lost and a huge warning error came up. Pure anguish was what I had felt. My entire schooling, in fact, my entire life, had led up to that point – and I was failing, like my parents always expected I would.

  I rushed to the hall to see if they’d been ejected, but they hadn’t. They were still staring into their goggles, literally a world away, and I had to make a decision straight away. “Pull the goggles off,” I commanded.

  As I said this, I knew that they could potentially go insane. Their minds were still in the game regardless of where their bodies were. And that’s exactly what happened – bodies out but minds in.

  Only one of the six students actually regained any form of responsive consciousness – 3. When we found him he was barely coming to but was in a much better condition than the others. We weren’t exactly sure why this happened, but we didn’t complain – it was one less payout we had to make!

  As alternative compensation – we gave him a job. Mostly menial tasks and whatnot but occasionally, when he was conscious enough, he did the odd programming task. Nowadays, his mind seemed to switch between the two worlds and more often than not, he found it hard to tell the difference between reality and Simulator. However, he was still in the game and I had no explanation as to how 3 managed it without any equipment…

  After the catastrophe that nearly entirely crippled years of plans and hundreds of millions of dollars of investors’ money, all there was to show for it was a still-functioning map of the lost kids’ simulations’ locations, the settlement records that put the company on a blacklist for eternity, and now, a year later, a somewhat smoky reputation that was overshadowed by the promise of the Omega…

  I focussed on the screen again, nothing interesting, back to my reminisce.

  Oh the Omega – the Academy’s one and final way to turn even the best of friends against each other. It was the epitome of the Academy’s outlook on life - win at all costs, including betraying those closest to you.

  And so there it was, the less than pristine past of the company and the broken stories of the members of our engineering team.

  Now though, as I sat back in my recliner, looking up at the giant screen, I couldn’t help but feel satisfied – this time, it was all going to go to plan.

  “Okay,” I began, dictating to 1 and 2, “we’ll need close-up, moving, action-shot-type images of each of the competitors’ faces, a fast-paced backing track and some short-burst clips of the kids running, fighting and using their powers. 1, you’re in charge of visual, 2, you’re in charge of audio – I want you two collaborating to make the best damn promotion commercial possible – and 3,” he was zoning out again, I passed a small sigh, “you’re with me, we’re going to watch these kids battle it out.” The three of them stood there nodding, as if waiting for me to say something else… “What are you waiting for idiots? GO!”

  And with that they darted off in attempt to show themselves as more dedicated than the other.

  “Pull up a chair,” I said to 3, who still hadn’t moved. Coming to, slightly, he shuffled across the metallic floor and slowly dragged a desk chair next to mine. He sat down and watched the screen with me.

  “Remind you of anything?” I asked him, half not expecting even an acknowledgment, let alone an answer.

  “Yes, it does,” he said flatly but surely.

  It was strange, hearing him speak with such definition. I turned to him and saw him staring at me with conviction. His eyes were a piercing blue and my skin prickled. He made me uncomfortable, but he didn’t intimidate me.

  “Who do you think is going to win?” I asked him

  nonchalantly.

  His eyes seemed to glaze a little and he mumbled a response.

  Without warning his eyes widened and he screamed “ELIZA!”

  He was in one of his dazes again and I chose to ignore him. He would often react to things that weren’t here and it astounded me to think that perhaps he was reacting to the Simulator he was still trapped in.

  Looking back to the screen, I weighed up the contestants. Personally, I thought B3ast or Victor would win. Victor was physically stronger than the other contestants and would probably have less of a problem betraying the others – he had shown it with what seemed to be a love affair with Grace.

  B3ast, on the other hand, could justify anything in his own mind – and that made him dangerous. Frankly, I enjoyed that.

  Lily was just Lily. She looked alert, always a step ahead and I had watched as her profile altered to display her new premonition power – kind of useless if she couldn’t stop the dangers she saw coming. She was the smallest threat, regardless of how surprised I was of her performance in the lead-up to the actual Simulator.

  Grace, on the other hand, was lethal. She had somehow convinced everybody that she was sweet and yet I watched as she manipulated Victor into servitude. Her power was very interesting and I was excited to see what she would do with it, hopefully kill Stefanie.

  I resented girls like Stefanie. Material girls whose minds were in the clouds and whose bank accounts were even further out of this world. Maybe it was because that crowd had belittled me in the past, but I wanted to see her out of the competition first – and it would please me immensely if B3ast or Grace did it.

  Finally there was Xander... he was a bit of a dark horse. I wasn’t sure what to expect from him, but either way, nothing too spectacular. The odds of him winning weren’t fantastic.

  The screen caught my attention with a flash of colour. Pointing at one of the smaller panels with a small remote – there was one part of the screen constantly focussed on each player – I opened Lily’s panel and watched it enlarge on the main screen.

  She was crouching behind a hedge as B3ast shattered a clump of glass trees. When had he received that power? And how had I missed it?

  I enlarged B3ast’s panel, then, and watched as he opened his computer screen.

  I froze at what I saw – a run file that had accessed the mainframe. I recognised the programming I had spent months on and where I saw irregularities, I knew B3ast had changed something.

  At first I saw that the changes weren’t too big, mostly just him experimenting – but I realised he had control over the powers and I realised the potential for disaster. He could easily exceed the data storage limit each player profile had if he damaged the code that stopped it from happening – and I didn’t even want to think what would happen then.

  “3,” I began sharply, “I need you here.” I watched as he began to stir. “NOW!” I yelled, voice shrill at the prospect of my empire collapsing… again.

  “Use that keyboard over there,” I pointed to a small panel against the wall that was home to the computer that I installed to help regulate Simulator.

  “Open up the weapons.main file – and delete B3ast’s weapon before he d
oes something stupid.” 3 was unusually alert and bustled over to the monitor, beginning his work.

  I silently admired B3ast’s cunning. How he had thought to use the computer I originally placed in there as just a digital map, to hack the system, was nothing short of incredible.

  “How’s it going?” I called to 3.

  He just shook his head, a bad sign.

  The room began to rumble. I shrank into my chair as metal creaked and the image that filled the entire wall turned to static.

  MALFUNCTION.

  Big red letters fixed themselves on the screen, behind them I watched B3ast dance triumphantly. Using another set of smaller screens to review the footage, I watched B3ast delete the timekeeper.dat file – he may as well have deleted my career too.

  Anger welled up inside of me. This was not happening again.

  The letters went away after a brief pause and I considered my options.

  I summoned 1 and 2.

  “Eject them,” I said simply.

  I bored my eyes into the two henchmen. They flinched beneath my gaze, 1 quivered.

  “W-we would,” 1 said shyly, “but we’ve been locked out of the system.”

  “You mean to tell me,” I hissed, voice full of cold fury, “that a twelve year old has, in at most twenty-five minutes, locked you out of a system that’s been in development for three years?”

  “Yes sir,” they squeaked.

  There was a lapse in conversation. The only sound was my heavy breathing. I clutched the bridge of my nose, deciding that I had no other choice.

  “If you would like to avoid spending your life behind bars,” I smiled, gritting my teeth, “then you will do as I say. We have zero control over the system now, 3 will do what he can but that’s not much. I will continue to watch the game play out, hopefully they kill each other before… you kill them.” They stared back at me, puzzled. I spoke slowly, condescendingly enunciating every syllable, “You two,” I paused, “are going to,” I stopped again, “remove. Simulator’s. Power. Source.”