Playing Tyler

by T L Costa

  Still got nothing. “B, what are you getting at?”

  “Looks like your boy Rick runs some sort of program for the government. And if it’s funded by JSOC, then it doesn’t have any congressional oversight. Hell, Congress may not even know Haranco exists.” His fingers keep pounding on the keys. Then his eyes get wide in a rush. The muscles on his face freeze, then fall. “You said that Haranco is a subsidiary of Tidewater, Tyler.”

  “So?”

  “Did Rick tell you any of this?” B’s face is bright, excited, angry.

  “Why would he tell me any of this?” B doesn’t make any damned sense sometimes.

  “The guy brings some crazy piece of equipment built by one of the largest independent defense contractors in the nation into your house, Tyler, to give to you to ‘test’ for him and you didn’t even ask him exactly who he works for and what it is that he does?”

  Brandon seems to take up three times as much space as the little wicker chair that he’s sitting on.

  “No, B.” I look at my feet. Worn boots on the concrete floor. B’s face looks hard, like the concrete. Like I’m an idiot.

  “Look, you have to talk to my friend Todd about him. He wrote a whole book about Tidewater. They’re no good.”

  “I trust him.” Rick’s been there for me. Kept me going when all Mom could do was cry and when you were doing nothing but putting more track marks on your arm in some ditch or crack house or wherever the hell it was that you went.

  “Then why did you look all this stuff up?” B asks.

  “Because Rick’s the only functional person in my life right now and if he’s acting weird, I want to know why,” I say. It’s true. Drinking. Hate the drinking.

  B leans over, puts his elbows on his knees and runs his hands through his shaggy hair. His face looks like a balloon slowly deflating. I’m not supposed to bring up the past when I visit, guilt makes recovery harder, I guess. Right in front of me the color that was in his cheeks, that was in his voice when he was talking, disappears. I should be more careful with what I say.

  “Shit, B, I didn’t mean it like that. I looked it up because I was bored.”

  “Watch yourself.” The words, his voice, sounds thin, breakable, like glass.

  “Sure.”

  “No, I mean it, Ty. Don’t put too much faith in the guy. These big companies can be into all kinds of crazy things, things you don’t want to get involved with.” Paranoia comes with the drugs, but really, B was paranoid long before he got into H. Rick’s cool, I’m sure of it, his ex-wife must be bugging him for more money or something. That causes a lot of guys to drink. Drink more than usual, anyway.

  We sit. I stare out the window. Barren, twisted trees outside looking a lot like I feel. I dig out the paper, soft, folded, opened and folded again like three thousand times. I open it, look down, read it, close it, put it back into my pocket.

  “What’s that?” B asks, pointing to the softened paper.

  “Nothing.”

  B’s eyes run over me and I try to keep it cool. He smiles. “So who is she, exactly?”

  Shit. What do I say? This chick that I’m stalking? Best gamer in the country? Yalie who should have nothing to do with me?

  He snatches the paper.

  “Hey!”

  “What’s this, Ty? List of upcoming events at Yale? Who do you know who goes to Yale?” His voice is stronger now.

  “This girl… she… she set up the sim in the house. She did this summer internship at Althea or something. Works for Rick now.”

  “Why do you have this?” He holds up the paper, with that smile traveling up into his blue eyes, like a teacher, like an ass, like my brother.

  Don’t get too excited. Just cause he has moments like this doesn’t mean he’ll be back, doesn’t mean he’ll beat it. “Her name is Ani, and I took it off some bulletin board thing on campus.”

  “An older woman, Ty?” That smile turns his whole damn face high voltage. He laughs. “A Yalie? Shootin’ high, huh?”

  “Shut up. I don’t think she’s older.” I reach for the paper and he holds it just out of reach. I lunge for it and crash into him. We tussle back into the chair as I grab for it again, careful not to hurt him, and he laughs as I twist his arm back behind him. “You’re such an ass sometimes.”

  I grab the paper out of his hand and we both keep wrestling, laughing. He twists me around and digs his knee into my back. I yelp. He’s breathing hard, like it hurts. He says, “We better stop or they’re gonna think we’re being serious or something.”

  He lets go. I move back to my chair, looking down at the crumpled paper in my hand. “I’m trying to figure out if she’s gonna go to any of these things.”

  “A Yalie?” He sits. Takes a sip of water from the one plastic cup still standing on the table. “She’s gonna be at chess club for sure.”

  I laugh. “She’s not really a chess club kind of girl.”

  “No? Glee club, maybe?”

  “Fuck you.” I run my fingers over the list of student-sponsored activities, some on-campus, some off. “I’m thinking she might go to the midnight showing of Akira at Criterion with the anime club.”

  “Akira? Anime club? That’s pretty power-nerd right there,” he says with a sigh. His face falls and he crosses his legs and leans back into the chair slowly. Like he’s getting tired. I should go.

  I stand up. Can’t tire him out when he’s doing this well. I tuck the paper back into the pocket of my baggy jeans. “See you tomorrow?”

  He scoffs, reaches his arms out over the top ledge of the chair. “Yeah, man, I’ll be here.”

  Picking up my coat and pulling it in over my arms, I say, “Later.”

  Just as I’m walking out of the door, I hear his voice. “Hey, Tyler.”

  “Yeah?” I turn. He’s smiling like Satan in Vegas.

  “If it goes anywhere with that girl, remember” – he leans forward, eyes throwing sparks – “please her first.”

  Shit. Did he really just say that? My blood seems to pop and my stomach fills with gasoline. “What?”

  “Face it, man, you’re seventeen, you’re a virgin, you’d last all of three seconds. All I’m saying is, you please her first, and she’ll be more likely to let you try it again.” Smiling son of a bitch.

  “B,” I say. Shit. He thinks I’m going to have sex with SlayerGrrl? With Ani? I. Freaking. Wish. “There’s like no chance.”

  Miles and miles of empty road. Need more Mountain Dew. Need something. My eyes are red and my ass hurts and my sight is all blurry. Stupid sim, man.

  The drones are all stuck on different flight patterns over different highways. Though in this game, by “highway” you’re really talking about a dirt road best used by sheep. I’m looking for anything suspicious. Mostly this is the sim. Boring sim. Awesome sim. Can’t really make up my mind about it sometimes. What is this getting me? What’s the freaking point?

  My eyes are hot. Head dips into my chest. Then up. Shit, what time is it? 8am. Damn. Maybe I should log off and get some sleep. Then I see it. Pickup truck. Bottom of screen four. Finally. My heart picks up. I tap into the voice control on the headset to call the central command of the game unit, SKY. Don’t remember what it stands for.

  I set the drone 407 on its tail and zoom in. “I’ve picked up an unidentified truck moving north-northeast at approximately forty-five miles per hour.”

  SKY says to set the tail in that monotonous computer voice. I pull drone 407 off auto and set it to track the truck. Pickup truck. Zoom in closer. Old truck, half-rusted, like out of some zombie apocalypse flick. “Speed decreasing, set tail 407.”

  “Confirm tail.” I don’t know why the voice from SKY has to come through a headset. I’m gonna tell them that they should change that. It’s sort of annoying having some voice cutting into your tunes to tell you what to do all the time. Like the stupid GPS in the car.

  The truck blows past some shack. Nothing much in the desert. Lots of dirt, lots of road, sometimes the com
puter even gives me sheep, but not today. Just some rusted-out truck and broke-ass gas station.

  A puff of dust temporarily blocks the lens of the camera as the truck pulls off the side of the road. Shit. Driver just probably needs to piss. Do they program that into videogames? They shouldn’t. Totally shouldn’t. I check the mapping screen and overlay the truck location to the potential vulnerable culverts beneath the road. Good places to put an IED.

  I make the match. “Vehicle parked at culvert 56.”

  “Clear to target,” SKY indicates and I set the targeting device on tail 407. Two people get out of the truck. Carrying backpacks… to the culvert beneath the road.

  “Two men leaving vehicle and heading south-southeast into culvert 56.”

  “Weapons ready on tail 407?”

  “Two Hellfires.” I’m gonna take them out. “Lasing.”

  “All clear. Targets engaged?”

  I grab the joystick and flip off the safety. Hitting in the key code to arm the machine guns on the drone, I fly it in low. “Targets locked.” The drone lowers, so low along the road I swear I can see each pothole and oil stain. “Engaging.”

  I fire. The men, which the computer overlays with red to help assist in targeting, go down. The whole segment of road blows. Too bad I can’t see the shock on their faces. The dudes in most games always look so surprised when you kill them. I pull the drone around.

  “Targets eliminated.” I say into the mic, circling the drone around for the clean-up sweep. Truck is far enough away from the road that it escaped most of the blast. “Approved for clean-up?”

  “Heat signature in truck?”

  I scan the truck. Don’t think there’s anybody else in there. If so, that’s too bad for them. “Normal. Wait. Yeah. Got one more in the truck.”

  “Clear for cleanup.”

  I sweep the drone around and target the truck, dropping one hundred pounds of Hellfire on its ass. Circle for a bit, waiting for the heat signature to go cold. Not such a bad game, really. Putting the drone back into the auto route with the others, I note that my kill count in the upper left-hand corner of the screen is now up from 7 to 10. Low kill count, of course, compared to most other games. Don’t care, though, this one feels real.

  Maybe too real.

  CHAPTER 12

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6

  ANI

  I turn back to the computer, briefly glancing at the people in the other booths. They keep an active log of all sites visited by guests at the library, but it doesn’t matter, I just need to do this from a public ISP. There will be no log when I’m done; public computers like these are easy to clean. Libraries have the worst firewalls ever since the good ones cost too much money. Gotta love public funding.

  Moving my head from shoulder to shoulder, I stretch the tense muscles of my neck and take a deep breath. The library smells like a sad mix of dust and industrial carpet cleaners, but I love it all the same. The way the quiet amplifies the sound of my heartbeat as it rises, like an audience hushing as the curtains rise before them on a stage.

  Shooting the lady behind the reference desk my best sweet little girl smile, I get to work.

  Getting past UCLA’s security is too easy, really. All it takes is some time and a few bucks that I bummed from Julie before she even started there so we could have an easy way in before she set one of her polished toenails through the door. I started a “rate my professors” type website, which is free to use, but requires a working email address. Then we posted a link to the site on her Facebook page so all of her eight hundred friends, many of whom are now with her at UCLA, can see it.

  It never takes long before a professor finds out about such pages and tells their friends in outrage, and they can see what all the kids are saying about them as long as they, too, have a working email. I set up the site in August of last year, and by October of last year I had at least ten UCLA professors check the site from their work addy. From there, I sent them each a meaningful email along the lines of:

  Professor Jones.

  We are currently in the process of updating our account setup. Please click here to make certain our records our up to date.

  Then all I did was sign the name of the system administrator, put their street address and cut and paste the university logo and I had something like six of the ten professors actually do it. Which means I can do everything they can do… only better.

  So it takes all of maybe five minutes to get in, change my sister’s grade to a C, and get out. Three quick little clicks more and all the computer log shows is that I was on Amazon.com and MTV. Should I be risking jail to change my sister’s grades? She always looked out for me, let me hide behind her and her cheerleader friends when all the other kids at school would have been happy to stomp all over me. And I owe her for that. She’s always loved her freakish little sister, and isn’t that worth something?

  And besides… this is fun.

  I feel good, actually. I go back to my email, open Tyler’s latest message and read it again. I’ve been thinking about it, and Mr Anderson would have nothing to gain by sending one of his employees to jail. My science fair project, SkyPet, is what made Althea and Haranco both notice me. It was so easy to do, to change the drone I bought at the store and make it do what I wanted it to. It was just a matter of plugging the chips into the computer and rearranging the subroutines. So simple it was brilliant. Timed to take pictures every seven seconds, I flew it undetected over the red carpet at the Oscars ceremony, so I could make my demo level for World of Fire be a free-play set on the red carpet. I could weave in and around movie stars and limos and it was going to be amazing. It was amazing, actually, writing that level, and showing it off at the demo at the science fair was great.

  But something went wrong during SkyPet’s first flight. Unfortunately, I planned for a maximum wind speed of up to five miles an hour. I wasn’t expecting the thirty-five mile an hour wind gusts. SkyPet was thrown off course and flew over a corner of the Los Angeles Air Force Base, still taking pictures every seven seconds. I sort of ended my report for the fair before that bit, glossing over it by saying that it was blown off-course and I tracked it to where it eventually landed just outside of El Segundo.

  World of Fire’s Oscar level went viral, it seemed like the whole world was talking about it and SkyPet. Althea offered me the summer internship, helping them update their Universal Control System. Althea’s model is based on having two pilots sitting at the controls and one supervisor, and I didn’t really have to do much.

  Then Mr Anderson knocked on my door. He wanted me to make a game based on Althea’s UCS. But he wanted a single-pilot machine that would then be used to train the pilots for the UCS that Althea was set to sell to the Air Force. He mentioned all these wonderful things about a job with Haranco: the ability to work close to Yale, enough money to be able to cover almost all of Yale’s tuition, the chance to graduate from college with four years of relevant work experience to put on my resume, a chance to help my country.

  But that’s when the job interview became strange. It’s like he was reading my face, seeing that my first choice for college wasn’t Yale, it was MIT. And working for Althea was great in that it would almost guarantee admission to any school I wanted, but I wanted to design videogames, not work for some branch of the military-industrial complex. He watched me as my mind disengaged from the interview, and he asked my mother if she could get him a glass of water. As soon as Mom left the room, he showed me the pictures.

  Pictures from SkyPet’s cameras as it flew over the Los Angeles base. He used words like restricted air space and criminal trespass and federal offense. If I worked for Haranco, he could make sure that I avoided prosecution. I was fifteen, it was my first real job interview, and it was an offer that I couldn’t refuse.

  Cheeks burning, I still can’t believe that I forgot to factor in the potential for such high wind gusts. It was stupid.

  But I’ve been thinking a lot about it over the past week and I don’t think
that Mr Anderson would bring it up again. I mean, he would look even worse than me in court because he knew that I violated restricted space and hired me anyway. By turning me in, he would be turning himself in, and he doesn’t strike me as the type of guy who would do that just because I sent an email to Tyler. Tyler’s promised not to even talk about the sim, so I just don’t think it will be that big of a deal. Maybe. Hopefully.

  Staring at Tyler’s email, I hit reply:

  Hey Tyler,

  Sorry I haven’t written you back…

  No, that sounds completely pathetic. I delete and try again:

  Hey Tyler,

  How are you?

  No, I know how he is, he emails me like every day. God! I delete, try again:

  Hey Tyler,

  How are things going? Got your emails, but I’ve been busy.

  Argh! That makes me sound mean. I’m not going for mean. Why is this so hard?

  Tyler,

  Have you played the new Gods of Destruction yet? I haven’t picked it up but I hear that it’s good.

  -Ani

  What if he doesn’t like Gods of Destruction? I didn’t see it at his house and it’s still such a stupid thing to write. At least it’s conversational, I guess. He’s still going to think that I’m a moron. I lick my lips and delete it. God, if I was actually honest he’d never email again. I type:

  Tyler,

  You don’t want to have anything to do with me. Date some cute, nice girl from your school or something. Listen to Mr Anderson and stop emailing me. You’d be better off without getting involved with my terrible, messed-up life. Besides, I’ve never had a boyfriend before and I would do everything wrong.

  I squeeze my lips together as I look at the words. That’s what I really should send, isn’t it? The truth. But the truth is that I don’t want him to stop emailing, not really. I move my fingers over to…

  “Miss?” A voice calls from over my shoulder.

  I jump. I turn and see a librarian standing over my shoulder. “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry, but your time on this computer is up, we have other people waiting.”