Under the Shadow of the Plateau: Frontier Forever

by Benjamin Krieger

  “Oh noooo.” After a long moment of silent consideration, Lincoln said less excitedly, “They can do that? That’s messed up.”

  “The Chieftain said not to come back until I found myself... or something like that...” As Rhodes’ words trailed off, he couldn’t maintain eye contact with his brother, and he jumped back down to the jungle floor.

  After another long silence, Lincoln said excitedly, “Just stay here forever, man! Marion would let you.” He swung around through the trees violently as he started to yell, “You’d be the first human to do it. YES! Oh, man, I can’t believe this is happening. This is the best day of my life!”

  Ignoring Lincoln’s enthusiasm, Rhodes stared blankly into the dense green jungle and said with sopping melancholy, “I think I want to go all the way down to the coast again. Check out some more of those weird caves where we saw that megaturd last time. I can’t stop thinking about the smell.”

  Lincoln knew Rhodes wanted to look for the mysterious creature that they had been calling the Thunder-Lizard. There was definitely something new and dangerous prowling around the southlands, and its destructive wake had started not too long after Pathos’ disappearance, but that was circumstantial. Whatever it was left carcasses cleaned to the bone spread so far apart that it seemed like the work of locusts. Marks from the creature’s teeth and claws indicated it was growing at an alarming rate, but they hadn’t found a single eyewitness that could tell them about it. They had met a few animals who had heard it, mostly small creatures who had only survived due to the grace of large numbers, running for their lives as the monster decimated their herds. Many of them described feeling the same primordial fear that came with being surprised by venomous creatures, like spiders, snakes, or lizards. Just as many recalled the smell that came after a powerful lightning storm, which is why they called it the Thunder-Lizard.

  Nevertheless, Lincoln was confident that Goliath could take it in a fight. He wasn’t scared of it himself, but he didn’t want to go chasing after it either. Lincoln missed Pathos dearly, but he didn’t think there was much of a connection between the Thunder-Lizard and their missing brother. With as much humor as he could manage, Lincoln said, “I’m sorry, did you just say you want to go smell some shit?”

  Rhodes didn’t even acknowledge the joke. Still staring straight out into the trees he replied, “Yeah. Have you ever had a smell stuck in your head? It’s weird. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t help thinking it’s a clue.” Realizing how serious he sounded, Rhodes forced himself to laugh a little. “I’m just kidding. I don’t want to start talking about that yet. I want to go south soon, but I need to get a good night’s sleep first.”

  Right then and there, Lincoln resolved to keep his human brother there with the herd for as long as possible. He was still a little surprised that the Onondaga had kicked Rhodes out, because he had been showing a lot of improvement before he returned to them the last time, but he must have slipped back the other way. With as much enthusiasm as he could muster, the gorillion repeated his jest, “Seriously, man? Because I’m pretty sure you just said you want to go all the way to the southern coast just to smell some shit...”

  This time Rhodes chuckled but his eyes were still far away. “Hah, yeah, I mean that’s just one of the things I want to do down there. If we pick up on something else that seems better, we’ll do that.”

  “Pick up what?” Lincoln asked, “Thunder-Lizard shit?”

  Rhodes furrowed his brow and said firmly, “I’m going. If you don’t want to come, that’s absolutely fine. I just wanted to come here and say what’s up first.”

  “No, man,” Lincoln said, dropping down to the jungle floor with him. “That’s not what I meant. I’m definitely going.” He put his giant forearm across his brother’s shoulder consolingly, but then said with wry humor, “But you look like lizard shit right now. We should go eat a ton of food before we go.”

  “Yeah,” Rhodes agreed with a mild smile. “One hundred percent. I can’t wait to sleep, honestly. It’s been a rough couple of days.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Welcome to Earth

  Floating atop the invisible platform inside the Buena Vista arcade’s simulation, the Marshal was still getting used to not having a second voice inside her head. With a distinct separation between her biological brain and the artificial intelligence in her arm, she said out loud, “Okay, this was a bad idea.”

  As if her invisible partner was standing right beside her, the Logo’s voice replied, “Seems like the damage is already done. We might as well take a look around.” In the back of her mind, the Marshal could hear some indistinct chatter, but the Logo spoke over it. “Communication is a lot slower this way. I could read all these menus to you, but I think it will be faster if you look for yourself.”

  Three-dimensional block lettering came scrolling up out of an invisible envelope in front of her, and the Marshal began to parse through a long string of menus as the voice continued, “It all looks pretty innocent, actually. There’s some public storage space for rent, a few games, and an extensive jukebox, but nothing that looks malicious. The wireless connection we’re using is localized, and like Harvey said, there are no outside communication capabilities.”

  “What about logs?” the Marshal asked, frustratedly trying to find them on her own.

  “Seems to erase everything as it goes. I can track current usage though, and aside from us, everyone’s playing music and that game.”

  The Marshal scrolled through the menu and selected Air Assault. The bright blue sky remained, but it was suddenly full of distant blaster fire and explosions, and she was looking through the windshield of a space-age upper-atmospheric fighter craft. After staring out at the fray for a moment, the Marshal looked down at the cockpit’s controls and enlarged a map for a better view of the vast battlefield full of giant carriers, cargo ships, communication drones, and warships cruising in standard USi formations. Before she could comment on the legality of being inside such a sophisticated simulation, a blur of pink shot by her port side.

  “We’re the pink team,” the Logo said calmly through a small speaker in her console. “Wow. These things are nice.”

  From the wash of blue sky outside her window, it was hard to tell that her simulated craft was already going pretty fast, but the Marshal maxed the throttle to catch up with the rest of her squad. Weaving around to test the system’s limitations, she could feel the force pressing down on her chest and the blood inside her sloshing from one side to the other. Nearly passing out as she banked a little too hard into a corkscrew, she managed to say, “Wow. Yeah. This is really realistic.” Despite being inside a simulation, her body’s adrenaline response was even stronger than it had been on the Longcoat. Glancing at the map again, she regained her focus and asked, “Which one are you?”

  “Numbers two through twelve,” the Logo replied happily. “You’re number one. Let’s go, hit blue.”

  “Why blue? Orange is closer.” A rapidly fluctuating scoreboard appeared next to her map, along with a complex rubric that explained the scoring system. Blue had a commanding lead, and she could tell that there were many objectives beyond dogfighting, but not wanting to waste her time cross-referencing formulas, the Marshal chuckled and asked, “Okay, how do we catch up?”

  “Defense has the best potential for points per minute, but only if a team is actively attacking us,” the Logo explained. “By attacking blue, we’ll deny them points. If we wreck them bad enough, hopefully they’ll want revenge. Then we can start an escort mission and bait them into coming after us.”

  “Yeah, I get it.” The Marshal pulled her craft into the lead position and picked up the pace. The objective was a blue frigate that was already engaged in a skirmish with some computer controlled raiders. There were twelve human players in a smart defensive formation underneath the ship’s belly, surrounded by thirty-three non-player ships of their own. “Those bots are using some really outdated USi formations.”

  “Ye
ah, they’re just fodder meant to get in the way of live targets,” her AI wingman explained. “Makes it costly but necessary to fire at them.” A grid overlay suddenly appeared on the Marshal’s windshield, revealing a giant gravity well off her starboard bow. “Seems like those pockets are partial vacuums too. Be careful.”

  The entire blue convoy was in a slow slingshot maneuver along the rim of the gravitational field, and as they got closer to the sparkling blaster-fire and careening fighters, the Marshal was reluctantly impressed by how realistic the simulation was. “Have you looked at the code for this? The physics have a lot of really fine detail.”

  “There are no serial numbers or signatures,” the Logo confirmed, “but I agree, it’s probably a pirated USi training program.”

  As soon as the pink team got within range, a volley of blue blasts came at them, and the frigate sharpened its turn to pull everyone deeper into the gravity well. Weaving through sloppy sheets of defensive fire, the Marshal said, unimpressed, “Seems like the human pilots are using the same ancient playbooks, but it’s hard to tell if they actually have access to illicit training or if they’re just mimicking the software.”

  The Logo replied with a playful tone, “Guess we should go ask.”

  With a grin, the Marshal leaned into her throttle, skirting the upper limit of the virtual craft’s safety capabilities. There were no vibrations coming from the beautifully engineered ship itself, but she could feel pulses of energy coming through its walls from her boosters and nearby blaster fire. Preparing to draw out defenders, she swung her ship down and under the blue formation. After flicking a few switches to adjust her defenses, she opened a public channel and said, in her most professional voice, “Ahoy. Surrender your cargo or die trying.”

  A few laughs came back and one of the enemy pilots said, “Come and get it, scallywag.”

  With one ship accompanying her, the Marshal broke off, leaving ten on course with guns blazing. Three blue ships went to meet her and did a halfway decent job of disrupting her flank before entering a dogfight that brought them above the frigate’s port bow. A few of her blasts had already struck the enemy’s shields on her first pass, but she did a barrel roll and landed three more right into the windshield of one of her pursuers, which exploded with a shower of sparks and debris that sent a jolt of joy ripping through every cell in the Marshal’s body. After deactivating her comms, she hollered exaltation as her bloodstream was flooded with a new brand of excitement. She felt alive than she ever had out in the real world.

  Compared to the blue pilots who had engaged the Marshal, the ones who stayed behind to guard the objective had no idea what they were doing. With a neat hairpin loop, the Marshal and her wing cut back down towards them, regaining the flank and effectively pinning them against their own frigate. Dodging enemy and friendly fire as she weaved her way through her disorganized foes, the exhilaration only increased the Marshal’s deadly focus. She gunned down two more ships and reopened comms to the pink team. “Wooooo! Y’know, I definitely prefer a good fight, but there’s something to be said about shooting fish in a barrel!”

  Concentrated fire from the Logo controlled ships took out five more members of the blue squadron and a number of non-player ships before they switched their focus to destroying the frigate’s undercarriage turrets. Two blue players managed to escape and reconvene with the ones that the Marshal abandoned, who were now using the curvature of the frigate’s stem as cover. In position to engage but just outside of firing range, the Marshal opened comms to the blue team again. “You guys are pretty good. Where’d you learn to fly like that?”

  A voice identified on her console as the blue captain replied, “No need to be rude fly guy. Finish us off so we can run it back.”

  Realizing how her inquiry had been misunderstood as sarcasm, the Marshal said quickly, “I’m serious, you must have had some kind of training.”

  “Real funny, lady. If you wanna be a dick, that’s fine,” replied the same voice, and all the blue ships turned grey.

  “They surrendered to deny us points,” the Logo said matter-of-factly.

  Disappointed in herself for the failed interrogation, the Marshal said glumly, “Yeah. I didn’t play that right at all. I was trying to be casual...”

  The Logo laughed. “Don’t take it personally. He was just defensive because they got rocked so hard. Let’s start an escort mission and try again.”

  The blue team didn’t come after them on that next run, but the orange team did, and the pink squad ruined them just as thoroughly. Considering her extensive military pre-ed, the Marshal was surprised by how much of a rush the game gave her. Every squeeze of the trigger made her melt into her seat a little further. Flying the virtual craft felt natural, and she knew it was just a simulation, but shooting down virtual wrongdoers felt like the right thing to do. With every energy blast she sent tearing through an enemy fighter, the Marshal felt herself becoming more addicted to the sensation. It was disconcerting, because she actively loathed the premise of being inside a virtual world and wanted to urge everyone to get out, yet she had no desire to stop playing.

  For countless hours, the Marshal interrogated other players, comforted by the fact that time passed more quickly inside the simulation. Even though hours spent flying would equate to minutes out in the Buena Vista bar, the information she was gathering was not particularly useful. The laborers all had high processing power and retention capacity, which said a lot about the hospitals they were born in, but none of that was more dangerous than the CBis they had acquired after birth. The training they had received had occasional hints of USi influence, but nothing as advanced as the game itself. None of the enemy pilots were anywhere near the Marshal’s level of skill or strategy, yet she received great satisfaction from shooting them down. She justified each new campaign under the auspice of Air Assault being stolen government property and her having an obligation to investigate.

  Aware of her internal hypocrisy, the Marshal said to the Logo, “These addicts are a waste of life. Do they not understand the innate evil of virtual realities?”

  “Definitely not.” The Logo put a wide array of usage statistics on the Marshal’s screen. “I hacked into their personal accounts, and they sometimes spend days working on data processing jobs. Then when they’re done, they come to places like this and play games. It’s terrible.”

  They both recognized that computer-brain interfacing was necessary for the world economy, but they resented how it’s fulfillment had manifested itself out here in the desert. Knowing the answer already, the Marshal asked, “And the contracts are coming from New York?”

  “The evidence is inconclusive, but that seems safe to assume.”

  Although thoroughly disgusted by the migrant lifestyle, the Marshal was starting to understand what Harvey had meant about them being slaves on a more personal level. The way they fought was lazy. Their eagerness to die and respawn made clear how little regard they had for their real lives. It was such a terrible waste. In many ways, the little people were the Marshal’s antithesis, built to uphold the status quo no matter how filthy it had become. But at the same time, they weren’t conspiring against Natural Order, they were doing the jobs they were born to do. They weren’t malicious in their desire to steal government property and violate the embargo, they were just blowing off steam.

  Pink was on top of the leaderboard by a large margin now, and the Marshal’s personal stats were approaching a few all-time records. Although the rest of his squad had been replaced, the original blue team leader was still playing, and he had listed pink as their official rivals. At first, he had displayed some fairly convincing military professionalism, but more of it slipped away with every defeat. The frustrated man responded with the most unique swear words the Marshal had ever heard, and his increasingly visceral reactions had definitely been part of why the pink team was picking on him. After yet another one of his assaults was shut down, the blue captain yelled, “I quit! Go buy yourselves some jelly bea
ns, you fart handlers.”

  Roaring with laughter, the Marshal was mid-celebratory-corkscrew when the Logo came over the comm with considerable urgency, “You’re not going to believe this. Remember I said there was private storage on this network? Well, it seemed benign at the time, but it turns out that what looked like a simple knockoff of some USi encryption keys was actually a clever facade. Underneath was a mountain of well-hidden data, and I just found a message addressed to you. Athena-class Marshal #2.”

  Having been so mentally absorbed by the rapid succession of battles, the news rattled the Marshal. Immediately ejecting herself from the Air Assault program, she found herself standing on an invisible surface again, staring at a series of menus while the Logo explained, “Hopefully I can transfer the rest of the files to you more quickly once we disconnect, but you need to watch this right now.”

  The menus were replaced by an image of the original Marshal looking awful—her hair was short, her clothes were torn and caked with blood, but most notably, she was missing her Logo and the arm that it should have been protecting. Her voice seemed different too—the new Marshal recognized it as her own but there was gravel and grit to it. All together it was enough to make the woman on-screen seem like a complete stranger. “Howdy, partner. Welcome to Earth. I hope you found this message easily enough. Even though I don’t know how this is all gonna play out, I’ve got a lot of knowledge I need to drop on you and there’s not a lot of time.”

  The blue-grey eyes of both Marshal incarnations flashed with intensity as the video continued to play. “Earth is a pit, and it stinks. Nothing here is legit anymore. The underworld economy is much bigger than it looks on the books. I’ve been working on this guy Mister Morton, who thinks he’s big time, but he’s actually just a puppet too blind to see his strings. He facilitates the movement of a lot of merchandise, and he employs a lot of people for the legwork, but I don’t think he actually understands how his offworld connection works.” Then she grimaced a little as she admitted, “I haven’t figured that part out either, but that’s who we’re really after. Whoever’s on top. Morton’s just a middle man.”