by George Ebey
US copyright ©2016 by GEORGE EBEY
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any informational storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
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Published in the United States by Glass House Press, LLC, 2016. GLASS HOUSE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Glass House Press, LLC.
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ISBN: 978-0-9977461-1-2
Library Of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication is on file with the publisher.
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Cover by White Rabbit Book Design
Book design by Inkstain Interior Book Designing
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First Edition
San Diego, CA
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1
When the countdown reached zero, a tiny robot charged out of the starting gate, its two laser guns loaded and at the ready. One was a Gatling-style repeater designed for rapid bursts at multiple targets. The other was a smaller rifle design, to be used when precise and controlled shots were required. The robot was sure to need both in this dark and dangerous place.
Smoky and dimly lit, the arena had the pocked and crater-filled feel of a desolate moonscape or asteroid, the peaks of white stone in the background giving way to valleys of gray dust and making the terrain both dense and desolate. Home to numerous corners, crevices, and sunken pits.
Plenty of places for enemies to hide. Which meant the robot needed to find cover quickly. Here, it was exposed—an open target for an attack that could come at any minute.
But where could it go? Because any place that provided cover could also contain a trap.
The issue was settled a second later when the first attack came from the left, a box-shaped flight-drone popping up from behind a large rock and opening fire with its own weapon—a single laser cannon jutting out from its pointed nose cone. The shots came in fast and hard, each one aimed with pinpoint precision.
The robot dodged to the right, narrowly escaping the drone’s blasts, and took aim with its own laser rifle, ready for a quick retaliation. With a soft woof, it zapped a clean shot right into the center of the drone, sending it blinking out of existence in a flash of sparks and flame.
And with that, the game was on.
Up ahead, two more drones appeared, looking like twisted metal buzzards, each complete with a pair of sinister eyes and a set of razor-sharp teeth.
Now it was the Gatling’s turn. The robot quickly brought the gun up and initiated the sequence, sending the turret spinning, its six barrels blazing away in unison, the reports deafening. A split second later, the first drone was toast. The second, though, looped under the streams of Gatling laser blasts long enough to get off a couple of nose-cannon shots, which tore through the air and lit the place up in a hail of bright-hot fury. But the pressure of the Gatling’s fire dulled the drone’s accuracy, distracting it and forcing its shots to go wild and miss their mark.
The robot took the offensive now, pulling up its laser rifle and sending another shot into the foray. It was spot on, and within seconds the second drone had disappeared in a blaze of light.
Three down.
And that was only the beginning. Soon there were more drones in the air, popping up from various hiding spots and bearing down on the robot in a coordinated attack. They’d been waiting, it seemed, and now zoomed toward the robot in a tight V, their nose-cannons firing as they swooped in like a pack of hideous mechanical Valkyries.
Somewhere deep in its core brain, the robot processed the command to flee with great urgency. This place was too hot, too exposed.
If it didn’t get out of there right now, it was done for.
Using the terrain for cover, it ducked into a nearby crevice and went on the move, searching for safety. The crevice was snaky and twisted, a mazelike environment that was good for cover, but was also a good place for an enemy ambush. This was reason for worry. The robot could only see as far as the next bend, and for all it knew, it could be speeding right into another nest of drones.
Still, it had little choice but to head into the tight, unstable place and risk it. At least here, the rocks and peaks gave it a brief respite from the enemies that were actually pursuing it. And if it could find a good ledge or overhang, it might just end up in a protected position—a place where it could hide and pick its enemies off one by one.
But it was tricky. Because the robot had no way of determining where any crevice actually led to.
Then it came abruptly to a sharp corner, where the tiny makeshift pathway forked in two different directions.
Right or left?
One path might lead to a perfectly defensible position. The other could take it directly into a trap. But there was no way of telling which was which. The one thing the robot did know was that remaining idle in this place was dangerous. So, without another thought, it took the right fork—for no reason other than the fact that it was there—and raced down the new pathway, stopping only when it finally emerged into a large, open crater.
If its small core brain could have processed the emotion of regret, it would have done so immediately.
A new pack of drones was already rising up from their slumber at the floor of the crater, their lasers opening up in a frenzied mass of chaos and light.
“ON YOUR LEFT!”
“I see it!”
Leaning further toward her operator’s station, Helen Hunter fixed her eyes on the forward vid-screen, her hands madly working the remote that controlled the robot inside the arena. She’d been in this chair many times before, but this was turning out to be one of the toughest matches she’d ever played. Still, that was her robot in there—her design, her baby—and she wasn’t about to let it go down without a fight.
Working the joystick controls feverishly, she watched the action unfold on the vid-screen, silently cheering as her robot’s laser rifle spat a sharp charge and fried the nearest drone into digital dust.
“Your turn!” she shouted into her headset.
“On it!”
Directly next to Helen, her best friend, Misty McKenzie, was sitting at her own operator’s station, eager to play her part. They were working in tandem; Helen controlled the laser rifle while Misty controlled the Gatling, and though each had their own vid-screen, both saw the same thing: a depiction of what was happening in the arena through the robot’s point of view. When they’d set up their strategy before entering the arena, they’d decided that Helen would lead with the laser rifle, leaving Misty to jump in with the Gatling any time the situation called for the big guns.
And the time was now.
Working the Gatling’s controls, Misty let loose another burst of rapid fire, taking out the two remaining enemies in a blaze of orange laser light.
“Yeah! Take that!”
Helen winced as Misty’s sharp voice echoed through her headset, the decibel level a notch too loud for her taste. She found her friend’s enthusiasm unnerving. To Misty, this was just one big game. But to Helen, it was something far more important. She had a lot riding on this, and needed her friend to focus.
They could celebrate after they won.
She took her own voice down a little to set an example, hoping it would inspire Misty to stay on task. “How badly were we hurt?”
Misty glanced at the diagnostic readout. “Only 15 percent down.”
Could be worse, Helen thought. The lasers inside the arena were actually nothing more than harmless beams of photonic light. That light hit sensors on
the bodies of the robots, which registered the hits and recorded the information as simulated harm.
The entire arena was, in fact, nothing more than one large simulation room.
If a person were to actually enter it, all they’d see was a network of holo-grids on the floor, walls, and ceiling, with two little robots—Helen’s and another competitor’s—scurrying around, trying to shoot each other with invisible radio waves. Beyond that, the room created a pixilated projection of anything the designers wanted to create. The information was then picked up by a robot’s camera, reinterpreted by data in its software, and projected onto the player’s vid-screens for added effect.
Other than the robots themselves, none of it was real. Not the drones. Not the hits. Not the damage. Each robot started out with 100 percent health. Each hit took away from that health. And once you were down to zero—game over.
But Helen couldn’t let that happen. Losing wasn’t an option. This game—and the prize she stood to win from playing it—were too important to her.
And despite the fact that this nightmare of a landscape was just a computer-generated simulation, her robot was still in serious trouble.
Even with all of the new drones taken out, she needed to escape this crater. There was another robot close, and the match wouldn’t be over until she found it and took it down. The drones were just a nuisance—a construct of the game to keep things interesting. The other robot—her competition—that was the real goal.
“I’m getting us out of here,” she said.
“Copy that.”
Helen watched the vid-screen and worked the controls, searching for a natural incline that could help her guide the robot out of the crater. The screen showed her a first-person view of everything that the robot saw, luckily, and a quick pan of the robot’s head-mounted camera revealed exactly what she was looking for—a small but stable ramp that should provide just the exit she needed.
Moving quickly, she ordered the robot out of the crater, working its camera and keeping its guns ready every inch of the way. Other drones could pop up at any moment, and the more they chipped away at the robot’s power source, the easier it’d be for their competition to take them out. Beyond that, Helen hated the idea of seeing her robot enduring any more damage than it had to. She’d grown to be quite fond of this little piece of hardware.
It even had a name.
DEBBI: an acronym for Destroying Enemies with Battle Bot Interface. The name was Misty’s idea. The interface was Helen’s.
The rules of the game allowed for multiple operators, as long as only one robotic unit was used. Ordinarily, operator teams assigned one teammate to run the unit while the other controlled support functions such as keeping an eye on diagnostics and ammunitions levels, and helping to spot when enemies appeared. But Helen had come up with a different idea: Why not have two people share the operation in tandem? Each robot had two weapons. So why not have one teammate on each, with two sets of eyes taking out two separate sets of targets at the same time?
That way, you had two minds at work, each bringing their own skills and instincts, for a double dose of offensive action and defensive reaction.
With no rule against this, she’d written new software for DEBBI that allowed for simultaneous operation between her and Misty. Helen would be in charge of the laser rifle and handle a majority of the robot’s movements, while Misty would ride shotgun—or in this case, Gatling gun—and take over movement duties if Helen was busy.
This gave Helen a chance to break away from the controls during moments of distress, secure in the knowledge that her best friend could take over. The two players had to be completely in sync in order to pull it off, but that wasn’t a problem for Helen and Misty.
Thanks to their years of close friendship—and countless hours of heavy gameplay—the strategy worked perfectly, and they’d been kicking some serious metal booty ever since.
But they weren’t out of the woods just yet, because the competition was fierce.
They were now in the semifinals for this particular game, which meant that the winner of the match would go on to the final bout, and a chance to win the coveted grand prize that Helen so desperately wanted—no, needed—to win for herself. It also meant that the team in charge of the other robot was equally good. They’d managed to beat out a lot of other players in order to be here. Now they were gunning for her.
Which was exactly why she needed to find them first.
Their robot had most likely been released on the other side of the arena, so Helen moved DEBBI forward, keeping the robot’s eye on the horizon for the other bot. With all the distractions caused by the drones, it could be anywhere by now.
Then, a moment later, and just as she was about to turn into another gulley, the worst happened. A flash erupted in the corner of the screen. For a moment, she thought it was just another drone taking potshots at them. But the severity and brightness of the light proved that it was something far more devastating—a simulated explosion that sent the percentage on DEBBI’s health diagnostic plunging.
Helen’s eyes flew to the forward vid-screen and she watched, horrified, as the health fell swiftly downward toward zero.
IN THE ARENA, DEBBI raced behind the protection of a large boulder.
In reality, of course, it was nothing more than a simulated projection of a boulder—placed there by the arena’s designers to act as a barrier against photon rays from enemy weapons.
But to the controllers, in their stations outside the arena, it represented a very real barricade that could shield them from enemy fire.
In this place, perception was everything.
As far as the players were concerned, the robots really were fighting on the surface of a moon. The laser beams were clear and bright. The hover-drones were actual targets, rather than just projected images inside a computer program.
And because the robots processed the same information, they were—at least as far their tiny, digital sensors were concerned—actually experiencing the environment. And the danger.
So when the explosion went off next to DEBBI, the robot saw the light, and registered the damage. Its internal processor quickly went to work, analyzing the intensity of the blast and measuring its destructive force. A split second later, it accessed its gamer database, searching for a weapon among the existing inventory that could create such an effect. Once complete, the database fell to a single listing that confirmed the amount of danger it was in.
The enemy robot was using a sonic grenade launcher. This was bad. Grenade launchers used powerful projectiles, capable of creating large explosions that could do a ton of damage.
DEBBI was lucky to still be online.
A few more shots like that and the bits of photonic shrapnel would devastate DEBBI’s body sensors and send its health bar to 0 percent. It would be finished.
Which left it with just one choice. It had to go on the attack.
HELEN COMMUNICATED THIS to Misty, who promptly asked, “Are you nuts? We’re down to 50 percent health, and that was just from a side hit! We have to stay under cover. One more blast from that grenade gun and we’re done for!”
Part of her knew Misty was right. They were under cover now, at least for the moment. And the thought of putting DEBBI in harm’s way twisted her stomach into a tangle of knots. But there was one other thought that made her even sicker: sitting around here doing nothing while the enemy bot lobbed another grenade past the boulder’s protective zone and blew them to smithereens.
No. We’re going.
“It can hit us behind cover just as well as it can out in the open!” Helen shouted. “At least out there, we can take our own shot.”
“Sure, but how are we supposed to get the drop on it?”
The answer presented itself a second later.
The flight-drones were programmed to be impartial menaces, hitting and harassing both competing robots with equal fervor. How one responded to them was simply a matter of strategy. Some operators chose to
hang back, while the drones attacked and weakened their opponent. Others liked to come out of the gate guns blazing, drone or no drone. From the looks of things, this enemy operator had chosen the former.
And the strategy had almost worked.
While the other robot waited in the wings, DEBBI had been fighting, and its health had been severely weakened by the drones. But now the enemy bot was on the attack as well, and the drones were zeroing in on the new target.
Helen took advantage of the brief distraction and panned DEBBI’s camera-eyes around the side of the boulder, directly toward the rival robot. Then she took a moment to note all of its basic components.
She recognized her enemy’s mistake right away.
The grenade launcher was its only weapon. Rather than adding a rifle for close-quarter attacks, the robot’s operators had evidently chosen to stick with just one big gun. It made sense; toggling between weapons was a tricky move, and though DEBBI’s interface made it far more practical, most operators didn’t have that choice. Plus, heavy weapons required a lot of code to create. The enemy operators had probably spent days writing the code needed to run that grenade launcher, and must have decided not to go the extra mile and write in a secondary weapon.
Big mistake.
Though devastating to DEBBI, the grenades were less effective against the flight-capable drones. They would never provide the protection the robot needed to get out of there.
Which meant that if Helen waited, the drones just might do her job for her.
So she just watched as the enemy bot took pot shots at the drones. Some of them were vaporized instantly. But others managed to avoid the grenades entirely, then swing back around and fire their photon lights into the enemy’s damage sensors. Before long, the other robot was in trouble.
Her heart raced with excitement. Come on, come on, she thought, mentally willing the buzzard-like drones to work their wicked magic on the enemy. And they did, swooping down and zapping it mercilessly with their nose-cannons.
