Escape The Grid: Volume 1

by Patrick F. Kelly

  “I’m on it.”

  As the AI program searched through every aspect of Maxime’s life on the grid and made similar searches for males like Maxime, Joey got up for a midnight snack. Linda was right about him. This mission brought out his most productive work. The odds were stacked against him, and yet he could make the impossible possible.

  I’m Joey Bag-a-donuts. I get things done.

  It would be a long night, but Joey felt good about his prospects. Tonight was all about research and planning. Tomorrow would be the first communication. Then he would work on the finishing school training scenarios. If everything went well, he could break Maxime out in two weeks and have a full week to train him for the first date with Margaret.

  It wasn’t out of the question. Maxime was in some grid camp in Tennessee with virtually no security. It was close enough to Virginia to make the extraction fairly easy and fast. Joey calculated that he could have him in one of his secure locations under the motel in less than 24 hours after the breakout.

  Easy peasy.

  16

  THOMAS LOOKED AROUND, having just jumped into the rabbit hole. “Where are we, Julia?”

  He looked down and saw they were standing on a white platform, like someone’s portal for logging in. Not Resort World. He looked around him and saw mostly a black void. There were about 30 or more 2D screens levitating in mid air, attached to nothing. Above every screen was the name of someone. They all looked like men’s names.

  “We are in my staging area,” Julia said. “Remember when you said that I wasn’t real except as a software algorithm? Well, today is your big surprise. I’m a real person, Thomas. Ta da!” She smiled, looking at him and hoping for the best.

  Thomas was taken aback. “You’re real?”

  “Born in 2030, the same year as you. I’m real, and I’m a woman, but unfortunately I’m 45 and not 25.”

  Thomas looked her over. Julia was still in the avatar of a 25-year-old from Venezuela. He collected his thoughts.

  “I’m so happy that you are real. I’ve been wishing you were real.”

  He searched his feelings. His emotions were a roller coaster. Just a minute before, they were in Resort World and he was convinced that she was pure software. He had felt love for her when he thought she was an AI avatar. Did he care if she was 25 or 45?

  She’s real. A real woman. Isn’t that what I wished for?

  His mind quickly began re-processing past experiences that they had shared together. Each one suddenly took on more meaning for him.

  “What are you thinking,” she asked, unable to read anything from his avatar’s body language.

  “Uhh, I’m uhh. I’m blown away. This is awesome!”

  “Thank God. I was so worried about telling you, but when you said that you might compliment my creator, I panicked a little.”

  He smiled broadly and took in the scene. “What are these screens in your staging area?”

  “I work for a group trying to help liberate men who are trapped in the grid camps. Men who want to get out but have no way and no civil liberties.”

  “Are there many men who feel like that? The way I feel?”

  “There are more than you might guess in the camps, and many more hidden in underground railroads. We are working to overturn the current power structure in Washington and repeal the Female Protection Act and similar legislation. Will you help us?”

  Thomas thought for a minute. Then he frowned. A flood of new emotions drowned him. First she was software, then she was real. But now her reality is a fraud. The experiences they shared weren’t because she wanted to be with him. He was just one of many pawns in a bigger game she was playing.

  This is worse than her being software, he thought.

  Physical pain splintered his shoulders. The pit of his stomach felt like someone had just knocked the wind out of him. He noticed her staring, and he struggled for the right words.

  “Was none of it real, Julia? None of the affection that you showed me? Is this all just part of your job? The same as that guy and that guy?” Thomas pointed at different screens from the staging area.

  “Oh no,” Julia rushed to him and hugged him. “Oh, Thomas. If you only knew. I care about you so much. It was so real - all of the affection and the conversations. I have such strong feelings for you, to the point that I’m taking personal risks that may jeopardize our mission. I’m sorry I wasn’t more clear.”

  Thomas hugged her back intensely. For almost thirty seconds, neither spoke.

  “Really,” he finally asked.

  “Yes, silly. Look at me,” she said. “Look at where we are. I’ve never brought anyone here.”

  It was the best feeling he had had in the last twenty years, perhaps in his entire life. His emotions had swung from bliss to heartache back to bliss in a matter of minutes.

  In real life, his arms were up and around an invisible object as he stood on a friction-free surface, wearing goggles and special clothing that allowed him to see, hear, and feel Julia. But in his mind, she had never been closer.

  “Can I see the real you?” he asked. “Do you have an avatar that looks like the real you?”

  “I do, Thomas. But for the security of the mission, I’m not allowed to use it or disclose my location. I can’t even tell you my real name. But I promise you that I can help you get back into the real world. I can help you escape the grid camp, if you want. And I will come to you and take you to a country where you will be free and safe. Would you want this?”

  Thomas breathed deeply and thought about every word she had just said.

  Escape from the grid… check. Go to another country… check. But what about being with her?

  “If I did this, would we be together? Would you want that?” he asked, grasping for the reply. Putting his heart on the line, needing confirmation.

  “More than anything I want to be with you in real life. Of course we would be together. Haven’t you been listening to me, silly?”

  Thomas smiled, thinking about being with the real Julia, and being in the real outdoors, eating real fruit. Maybe they would learn to dance together. He was planning to try dancing lessons after the bullfighting lessons. But now it could be real, holding each others’ arms on a real dance floor. He smiled so big, it made them both laugh.

  “How can you make this dream come true for me?” he asked.

  “It’s my dream too,” she replied.

  Over the next twenty minutes, Julia detailed the steps involved and the likely schedule. It was a six month process, maybe more, and there would be substantial risk for them both.

  “Are you still in?”

  “Is the Pope Catholic?”

  17

  SUSAN FINISHED her salad while her thoughts hearkened back to a meeting at the Pentagon several years earlier. The idea pitch where she first caught Secretary Lane’s attention. The proposal that put her career on the fast track.

  She had been with Emily from Soldier World and had presented a whole new way to conduct covert operations. She remembered it like it was yesterday.

  “Imagine the US government wants to kill a well-known foreign leader using a drone,” Susan had hypothesized, looking at Secretary Lane. “There are a few problems. The first is that it is illegal per the Geneva Convention and US law for a combat drone to be autonomous. To comply with the law, we must have a human pilot controlling the drone and only she can fire the weapon. The second problem is that military pilots are trained in the proper use of force. They are well-versed on the severe punishment for using a combat drone without the proper document trail. The third problem is that the President and DOD don’t want to have a document trail leading to them if a drone were to strike a US resident or foreign dignitary. With such a Catch 22, using a military pilot isn’t an option for covert operations.”

  Margaret had replied bluntly, “We know all this. What are you proposing?”

  Emily, Susan’s counterpart at Soldier World, had responded on cue. “Soldier World and the DOD
have worked together for years. The war simulations we created have trained millions of military personnel. We have an entire department of the company with top secret clearances.”

  Susan had expanded on the introduction, “Madame Secretary, Dr. Emily and I propose a stronger partnership into covert operations. We would fool ordinary gamers into completing the missions. Instead of using military pilots, we would utilize men from grid camps who believe they are playing a video game.”

  Margaret seemed uninterested. “Seems like an unnecessary risk, but I’m open to new ideas. Step me through it.”

  “Soldier World started as an online gaming platform,” Emily continued. “Multiple simultaneous gamers use it to play war in a virtual world. We know our players inside and out. We propose finding some men who live in grid camps, have low IQ’s, and never watch the news. Men with great skills at Soldier World who we can train extensively for new missions. We entice them to play in the new worlds.”

  “How do you entice them?” Margaret asked.

  “Prize money, VR gear, level increases on their profiles, bragging rights. That part is simple,” Emily replied.

  “If you say so,” Margaret replied.

  Susan took over, “The new worlds would be simulations of real places. Places where we would send combat drones. Once a gamer is trained well enough, we offer him a huge prize for winning his next mission. Tell him that the mission starts on a particular day and time.”

  Emily continued for her, “In reality, the mission is just him. And this time, he is controlling a real drone in the real world going to kill a real person. Someone the DOD wants to eliminate.”

  “Wouldn’t they notice? I mean, the real world is quite different from a video game,” Margaret said.

  “You’ve never played in Soldier World, I take it,” Emily replied.

  “Excuse me?” Margaret perceived an insult.

  “Ma’am,” Susan tried to recover for Emily, “what she means to say is that the latest generation of VR and the software at Soldier World is so good that there is negligible difference between the VR world and the real world. We don’t think that the gamers would know the difference, especially if we trained them on simulations really close to what they would be seeing on drone 360 video.”

  “OK, I’ll take your word on that. But wouldn’t they recognize some of the targets? Even people with low IQ’s who don’t watch the news might recognize famous leaders,” Margaret questioned.

  Emily replied, “Exactly, Madame Secretary. That is the critical problem, which is why we’re here today. Susan has an idea that would solve the issue, but we need considerable funding to prototype it.”

  Susan then continued, “The idea is called HRT for head-replacement technology and it is easy to understand but challenging to implement. We want to seamlessly change the heads and faces of the people in the room under video surveillance. When the gamer sees a group of people, we can control which faces he sees. Instead of seeing the famous world leader, he may see a troll’s head or a space alien. This eliminates the risk of the gamer realizing what he is doing.”

  Margaret asked, “Let me get this straight. You are piping in 360-degree video from the drone cameras that the guy is controlling, and the software would figure out who in the location was a person and replace their heads with something else of our choosing?”

  “Correct,” Emily answered. “The software would have to keep track of multiple people in the video feed and map them exactly to their specific replacements.”

  “That doesn’t sound so difficult,” Margaret said.

  “It isn’t technically as challenging as other things we’ve done. However, no one has ever built this type of software. We would need to build a lot of the algorithms from scratch,” Emily replied. “One of my associates has found a struggling startup company based in Los Angeles that has software allowing high school girls to put the rich and famous in their personal videos. We can sub-contract with them to get a quick prototype.”

  “How much?” Margaret asked.

  “Here are the figures,” Susan replied, waving at the wall screen. “I can handle most of it with my slush fund. I was hoping that you might authorize some extra funds my way, especially if the prototype goes well.”

  Margaret had smiled and they had settled on a plan. Over the following years, a prototype was demonstrated and Susan was promoted. Several successful missions were conducted, although the HRT was plagued with technical problems.

  And now here we are, Susan. Prototypes aren’t enough anymore. Time to up the ante.

  The memory of the past event faded from her mind, and Susan looked out her window. Emily and Natalie were standing on the curb, waiting for her, as the car pulled into Soldier World.

  It’s go time!

  18

  MINUTES BEFORE Susan arrived, Dr. Emily Wang sat in her office contemplating the video she had received from the Secretary of Defense. Emily was Soldier World’s Senior Liaison to the NSA, working directly with Susan. In the right-hand side of her wall, there was a countdown and map showing when Susan would arrive.

  This is the big one, Emily thought. The career maker.

  Emily and Susan had shared many secrets together, but this would be the biggest and riskiest.

  There would be collateral damage with a mission this big, but Emily’s job was to make sure that innocent people were protected. Not an easy task. Coupled with this being a series of strikes on US soil that somehow had to stay secret and avoid national media attention. How can anyone pull that off? One or two local incidents might escape the media, but this would be on the order of fifty.

  Is it even possible to keep something like that quiet?

  She glanced at the screen again and saw that Susan was two minutes and thirty seven seconds away from pulling to the curb.

  I probably need to greet her at the curb, Emily sighed. Bureaucratic protocol. Got to play the game.

  Susan was OK, as far as feds go. She wasn’t from Washington and didn’t work in Washington, and she had earned her position - unlike so many politicians. From that perspective, Susan was a lot more like Emily than other federal agents.

  Emily rose from her seat and walked out of her office. She looked at her wall screen and said “Wall - ask Natalie to meet me outside the lobby at the curb. Tell her Susan is coming with a classified mission.”

  She walked out, and pulled an electronic cigarette from her pocket. She inhaled deeply, had a second thought, and walked back into her office. “Wall,” she said, “Tell Natalie that this is a big one. Really big. Bring her A game.”

  Two minutes later, Emily was standing on the curb, putting the e-cigs away so Susan wouldn’t see them. Natalie walked up behind her. “You called me, boss.”

  “Dr. Natalie, I assume you got the full message?”

  “About my A game? Yes.”

  “This mission will probably just be the two of us, so I hope you don’t have any vacation plans or even weekend plans for the next 30 days.”

  “If it’s that big, I’ll cancel all my plans,” Natalie beamed. Then she added, “I’m excited!”

  Natalie is still very young, Emily thought. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

  When Emily hired her, part of the reason was her love of military missions. Far more gung-ho than most employees at Soldier World, her software skills were phenomenal and she loved war games. Natalie was perfect for covert ops.

  Maybe even too perfect.

  “Here comes Susan,” Natalie said.

  “This mission is so classified that we should just make small talk until we get to the secure conference room,” Emily told her.

  “Understood.”

  The automated car pulled up and Susan got out. Emily opened the door for her. “Welcome back, Susan.”

  “Thank you, Emily. Natalie, good afternoon.”

  “Good afternoon.”

  “Shall we go straight to the secure conference room, ma’am?” Emily asked. “Would you like some refreshments sent
up? Have you had lunch?”

  “I had lunch on the way,” Susan smirked, “McDonald’s salad.”

  For a senior agent at the NSA to eat a salad from McDonald’s was somewhat surprising, given that Susan could afford the finest meals from any restaurant.

  “Busy day, I’m sure,” Emily said. “Let’s get straight to it then.”

  The three women walked the well-worn path through the lobby and into the Secured Area, with doors opening as Emily approached and waved her hand. Since Soldier World was primarily a consumer entertainment company, their path did not go through the main walking areas and offices. The Secured Area was isolated, with a small fraction of Soldier World personnel having sufficient clearances to get through the doors. In the heart of the Secured Area was a conference room where the three women had held many meetings. Each woman got a retina scan before the door opened and each walked in individually. Once inside, the door was sealed such that sound waves couldn’t escape.

  Susan explained the situation. No real surprises for Emily, who had heard much of it directly from the Secretary of Defense. For Natalie, though, it was all new and all exciting.

  “I have so many ideas,” Natalie said. “We should use the HRT again, from the last mission.”

  “Wasn’t it too glitchy?” Susan asked.

  Emily suppressed her urge to talk, preferring to watch the dialog between Susan and Natalie. The head-replace technique had been a disaster. Its goal was simple: capture a video with a room full of real people and change the head of one or more people. The problem was, the software had trouble keeping up with the movements of the real-life people. In a scene where multiple people were turning and running in multiple directions, the algorithm couldn’t create a smooth experience. Instead, the players saw portions of the real head with portions of the fake head, or the fake head was placed at an awkward angle.

  “Nothing we can’t fix,” Natalie responded.

  “I don’t know,” Susan said. “Emily, you’ve been quiet over there. What do you think? Can the HRT work for this mission?”