LifeGames Corporatoin

by Michael Smorenburg

  “Say again? Delta-Foxtrot-Lima.”

  “Err… tha… that’s a negative transmit, o… officer.” She’d forgotten that she was being monitored; “…out.”

  The computer copied transmission receipt.

  Catherine felt like a fool talking to the computer, but all the same she hoped that her terminology was authentic, What does one call a naval flight controller anyway? she thought, Admiral?

  Reminded that this was only an illusion she had another idea to trick the computer. Without warning she suddenly looked up toward the sky and sure enough there she saw her own helmeted image reflected back down to her by the canopy. “Well I’ll be buggered,” she mumbled under her breath.

  The radio crackled into life once more, “Say again? Delta-Foxtrot-Lima.”

  In her quest to trick the machine, this time she decided to run another test. She said nothing at all.

  “Delta-Foxtrot-Lima, do you read me… over.”

  Still Catherine maintained radio silence.

  “Delta-Foxtrot-Lima, please confirm you copy me… over,” As if the statement were the product of an intelligent mind, the voice had conveyed a sense of urgency.

  It was a major effort to avoid instinctively answering the urgent request, but Catherine bit her tongue.

  “Delta-Foxtrot-Lima. Kindly establish…” Suddenly the voice of the computer was cut out and overridden by Kim’s concerned voice, “Miss Kaplan? Are you okay?!”

  It gave Catherine such a fright that she jumped, making the aircraft swerve. “Y… yes Kim. Sorry, I’m being silly. I’ve been trying to out-wit the computer.”

  Kim abruptly signed-off, apologizing for breaking into the illusion.

  Remembering that the entire complex had witnessed her childish folly repeated on every monitor, Catherine cringed with embarrassment; glad for the helmet to mask her shame.

  She sat for a while feeling as awkward as an adult in a child’s playpen with a stadium full of onlookers, but before long the illusion overtook her senses once more.

  The HUD indicated she was flying at three thousand feet over an ocean with the aircraft carrier appearing like a toy just over the horizon on her starboard beam. With all the deftness that Catherine could manage she carefully tickled the throttle back, watching her airspeed drop away; wary to avoid a mid-air stall, she eased the plane into a long gliding descent.

  The carrier was well in view as she leveled out at eighty feet. The blistering pace of the swell running under her belly was an inertial frame of reference by which to judge the plane’s breathtaking speed. The image was paralyzing, but worse lay ahead, much worse.

  Ken had been standing on the scaffold surrounds of the mock plane’s cockpit. He’d scrutinized every movement that Catherine had made, noting how the whites of her knuckles had grown more prominent with each passing moment.

  The contraption had hissed and shook on its pneumatic mountings. As the unit had rolled to its right in a nose floor-ward attitude, he’d tried to judge the feeling that Catherine would have been experiencing. He’d correctly guessed that she’d misjudged the end of the runway coming up in the launch sequence.

  Then he’d seen her wrench the joystick over and back in an effort to correct the nosedive of the craft. Watching the cockpit tip severely, coming to stand on its tail, he’d again guessed correctly that she had been seeing blue sky.

  He’d watched her a while longer, but knowing what adrenaline had been doing to her time perception he’d quickly bolted up to the control center to have a view of the flight from Catherine’s perspective.

  The main screen in the control room had been displaying an image that correlated with Catherine’s view. Ken had entered the room as Catherine had exclaimed what fun it was. He’d pulled up a chair and continued to watch, chuckling at her stammering reply to the computer “officer.”

  When she’d suddenly look up at the canopy he’d asked Kim, “What’s she up to?”

  “She’s trying to fool the computer I guess, Mr. Torrington. Most of the first timers do it, they don’t believe that the computer can be so true to life.”

  “Not a bad little pilot either!” Ken had pointed out and Kim had nodded in agreement.

  “Delta-Foxtrot-Lima, your heading is A-Okay but you’re closing too fast. Trim airspeed to One-Eight-a-Zero knots. Over.”

  Catherine checked her airspeed. The dial read two hundred and thirty knots.

  “Do you read me, Delta-Foxtrot-Lima. Over?”

  “Yes! Err. Affirmative, Sir!” Catherine was beginning to panic, “O… Over.”

  “Drop your undercarriage, Delta-Foxtrot-Lima. Over.”

  Catherine checked and realized that the computer was correct. She pulled on the knob and felt the clunky machinery engage. The additional air-drag made the plane shudder and slow. She studied her horizon, the carrier loomed in the middle distance but the gap was melting quickly.

  “Delta-Foxtrot-Lima, your range is two miles. Your ETA, forty seconds.”

  The forty seconds took forever to pass and felt more like a week as Catherine ran her final approach checks. Her airspeed was down to 185 knots and the cockpit shook violently as the plane skipped over the wind eddies that kicked up white horses and chop on the water’s surface fleeting close and fast below.

  “Delta-Foxtrot-Lima, adjust your altitude to Seven-Zero feet!” there was urgency in the voice again, “ETA touchdown, thirty seconds.”

  Catherine’s heart was pounding. A bead of sweat tickled her tear duct before finding its way into her eye. Her vision blurred and the eye stung from the salt. She shook her head violently but the unpleasant irritation could not be dislodged.

  The plane began veering dangerously and the controller shouted a string of commands that she tried to obey, “ETA, Ten-a… Nine-a… De-throttle. Seven-a… Descend! Five-a…”

  In a moment of panic Catherine slammed the reverse thrusters into operation and instantly the plane stuttered and began to plummet out of the sky giving Catherine the sensation of riding inside of a glass elevator.

  “THROTTLE-UP! Two-a…” the controller yelled.

  In that flit of a second she remembered her flight instruction; land under full power. Strangely, she also remembered seeing a television documentary years before about landings on carriers. The narrator had said the same peculiar thing, “planes must land under full power because, if the catch cable doesn’t engage, the engines must be ready to execute an instant takeoff.”

  She rammed the throttles to full power as the deck came rushing up to meet her and the last glimpse of ocean flicked out of sight beneath the nose cone. The backbreaking jar of hitting the deck was an explosion of sound that drowned out the final count of landing.

  Catherine was slammed into every bulkhead within the cockpit and the restraining crash harness bit deeply into her flesh as the mayhem of her broadside trajectory took her crashing through the catch barriers that had been pneumatically sprung to slow her momentum. She felt like a casual onlooker watching the scenery going by with resigned acceptance.

  After what felt like minutes, the plane slid to a halt. The undercarriage evidently sheared, the cockpit lay cantered over to one side with the wing tip propping up the fuselage.

  A deathly silence prevailed, broken only by the muted sound of running footsteps. Catherine looked through the cockpit dome to see a figure clambering up onto the listing wing. As he unhooked the canopy, the sound of the wind was the first thing that she could remember… the sound and the face of the man who had run out to meet her, it was Ken who beamed down at her.

  Then, without warning, he lunged deep into the cockpit making as if to kiss her full on the mouth. On reflex Catherine twisted away from him in an effort to avoid his greedy tongue.

  Suddenly, there was a touch on her arm and Catherine rolled her eyes to see the hand, but there was nothing there! Only then did the realization strike her that the touch was real, her visual perspective was not.

  She unclipped and removed the helmet. As
it came away Ken was still leaning into the cockpit of the micro-screen’s image. With the world of computer stripped away and the world of reality once more revealed to all of her senses, Catherine felt groggy with disorientation.

  The flesh and blood Ken was standing over the open cockpit, “After a landing like that I thought that you’d at least be pleased to see me.”

  Catherine was bewildered, her emotional mind not synchronizing with her intellectual one.

  “…and to think that I ran to rescue you,” He teased, “you’d pull away from my kiss, would you?”

  “It looked more like you were about to eat me!” she was forcing her mind to assign the illusion to its own context.

  “Stick around!” he promised, extending a hand to help her out of the confinement.

  Catherine looked about at the sea of fans smiling down on her through their glass fronted control rooms. It felt like being on Wimbledon’s Center Court.

  “Bumpy landing?” Ken inquired sarcastically.

  “Where should I send the doctor’s bills?” Catherine massaged her shoulder and he laughed. “Good God Ken, I’d no idea that it could be like that. Christ, I nearly wet myself for every second that I was up there.”

  As she spoke she instinctively looked skyward where, four stories above, the ceiling of the complex capped out the sky. Catherine was still finding it impossible to reconcile the fact that all of the action had taken place inside a sealed room.

  Ken identified her puzzled expression, “Imagine what it would feel like once Leon’s finished convincing you that it’s not a game. Imagine what it will feel like when you believe it’s reality.”

  She thought about Ken’s comment as she walked. A lucid nightmare, would be her best guess. “How long was I up? It felt like an hour,” she asked.

  “Twenty three minutes exactly,” Ken confirmed, “Imagine again that this wasn’t a real-time program. Imagine that you were time dilated. What would it feel like if your mind had been sped up ten or twenty times. Where would that take you?”

  “To Hell!” Catherine answered without any hesitation.

  Chapter 12

  Catherine was exhausted to her core, aching in muscles that she never realized existed.

  “I thought that you went flying?” Jacky queried suspiciously, as she massaged arnica cream into the blue swellings that blotched every part of Catherine’s body.

  “Not your kind…. Ouch…!” Catherine pulled away as Jacky probed a particularly ugly welt traversing her groin, the handy-work of one of the safety harness.

  “It looks like you crashed?” As an airhostess, Jacky was qualified to know a little about aviation. She had been shocked by the seriousness of Catherine’s condition and found it difficult to correlate the physical evidence with a flight simulator.

  “Actually, I did,” Catherine admitted.

  Jacky had just arrived home and Catherine hadn’t had time to brief her on the afternoon’s events.

  The stiffness of physical abuse had begun to set in while Catherine had still been at LifeGames’ premises.

  She’d excused herself and made a run for home before her muscles seized completely and, not being in the mood to cook, she’d treated herself to sweet and sour from her favorite Chinese take-away. Permitting herself the luxury of such oily and batter-heavy food was an agonizing self-conflict clattering between guilt and reward.

  Today the excuse had been simple; “I’ve already spent the calories.”

  Achieving a credit on the calorie count was always the objective.

  Jacky had arrived home to find Catherine sitting at the dinning table, nearly naked, tending to her injuries between mouthfuls of food. Jacky had taken over the chore, allowing Catherine to finish eating.

  As Jacky cleared the table, Catherine’s conscience crept back so she repeated the same calorie excuse to Jacky that she’d earlier told herself.

  Misery loves company, so with her appetite satisfied she had begun to feel remorse for her indulgence;

  “You’re not going to eat, Jacks?” she tempted. If Jacky would partake, it would diminish the weakness in her own mind.

  “No thanks Cath, I ate on the plane,” Jacky smiled knowingly, letting Catherine stew in guilt.

  After tidying away, Jacky went upstairs to find Catherine in a piping hot bubble bath. Only Catherine’s head was projecting through the growing tide of bubbles, and the increasing volume of snow-white froth was expanding as the Jacuzzi jets boiled the waters into lather.

  “Jump in, it’s great!”

  “I think I will,” Jacky was already unsnapping the clip of her bra, letting the straps fall away. Estimating where Catherine’s legs might be below the obscuring blanket of white, she stepped in.

  “OUUUCH!” Catherine let out a howl; Jacky had guessed wrong.

  “I hardly even touched you!” She apologized then recoiled; “Oh-my-God! I really am sorry,” she gently caressed the swollen shin that Catherine produced from below the bubbles, “I’m so sorry, Honey… sorry!”

  They lounged in the steamy waters for a while, the herbal salts and an overdose of anti-inflammatory tablets beginning to work soothing miracles. All the while Jacky maintained an inquisition of questions, extracting every detail of the day’s events from Catherine’s weary mind.

  “I’m going to have LifeGames put you in a court room scene. You can be the prosecutor!” Catherine warned playfully.

  “Don’t tell me that they’ve got a court program too?” Jacky asked excitedly. It had long been her yearning to become a lawyer, but cost and the lure of travel had put an end to the idea.

  “It’s not a single program!” Catherine pointed out, “LifeGames has every major case in history… or, at least the facts of the case, and how each case turns out is up to the delivery of arguments by the subject.”

  “You mean I could defend Manson and if I am convincing, he’ll go free?”

  Catherine nodded and added, “Or you might equally lose a case that had been won in reality!” Following her day in the complex, she considered herself something of an authority on LifeGames’ repertoire of options.

  Jacky’s jaw was hanging slack, her mind envisioning herself in court, “What on earth are they doing for lawyers?” she puzzled.

  “Not only lawyers, they’re training and assessing most of our judges, teachers, politicians… engineers, doctors. We’re going systematically through professions; we’ll be targeting the entire legal profession in the next phase of my campaign.”

  “You can choose to be either defense or prosecution?” Jacky was fixated.

  “Sure,” Catherine assumed an air of wisdom, “you can either be the judge or on the jury bench, or defense. Role playing is your choice.”

  “Fantastic!” Jacky’s mind was off racing again as she thought of all the cases in history that had produced an unjust judgment, imagining how she would remedy their outcome.

  “Computers are all about choices; that’s what LifeGames is really in the business of selling, choices. Of course this is no ordinary arcade game. It’s the most advanced facility of its type in the world, with branches in every major city,” Frustrated that she was unable to ad-lib the explanations, Catherine was re-regurgitating verbatim what she’d heard.

  “Do you think that you could organize a run for me?” Jacky asked with childlike excitement.

  Catherine cringed at realizing how silly it had been to have built Jacky’s excitement to such a pitch, only to have to disappoint her;

  “Phew, sorry, but I don’t think so, Jacks.” Then she realized that there was a perfectly legitimate reason that Jacky would readily accept without feeling hard done by, “LifeGames had to run me through the program to help me understand the product.”

  Jacky looked painfully shattered, the short-lived dream of fulfilling her legal ambition, albeit only to the accolades of a hallucinated audience, had been dashed.

  Catherine could see the lingering despair that she had caused so she searched deeper for a way to
sweeten the bitter pill;

  “You wouldn’t believe what they’re charging… I heard from the secretary that it’s thousands of dollars per hour!”

  Jacky had a violently jealous nature, and Catherine never personified her clients to her lover by name; she always implied a more distant relationship; the big boss, the accountant… the secretary.

  In this case it was increasingly awkward; her recent intimate dinner with Nancy was hard to play down and her forthcoming experience with Ken might equally play havoc with spoken truths.

  She was too far into her lie to break the silence; she needed to keep all parties apart.

  Catherine’s ploy worked as Jacky’s beaten illusions withered in the light of the exorbitant costs;

  “I suppose it’s off my budget for this month then…” she sighed, crestfallen.

  Most of the pilots on Jacky’s airline were constantly undertaking refresher courses at LifeGames to brush up skills. Considering the costs that Catherine had just revealed, she tried to estimate how much money it must be costing her company. The figure would have to be staggering.

  It irked her anew that the pilots could be so blasé about flying the simulator, yet she could remember a time when it had been the newest fad that created an instant hierarchy between those who had and those who hadn’t participated.

  It had wedged the gap between pilots and crew ever wider, making many of the pilots more aloof and condescending than they already were. They considered LifeGames training to be far beyond the scope of the crew’s needs or understanding.

  Despite the internal politics, it had recently been rumored that the entire crew would soon be put through their paces.

  “Imagine, Jacks… that’s only the price for the older commercial on-line run… the kind I just did, with all the paraphernalia. The moment you start going into Time Dilation, into neural linking… it begins to get properly expensive!”

  Since Ken had just explained the costing structures to Catherine, the details were fresh in her mind. The steamy bath and champagne they were sipping began to loosen Catherine’s tongue;