S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11)

by Tanpepper, Saul

  Jessie shoved the driver toward the group and leveled the pistol at Grant’s head. “You want to be the exception that disproves the rule?”

  Footsteps hurried toward her from her right, one of the Arc guards. Jessie swung her left hand up to steady the right, then pivoted.

  She fired once, aiming the bullet into the dirt at his side. He skidded to a stop and held his hands out.

  “Move toward—” she began, but she never got to finish the thought.

  Out of the darkness, what felt like a tank slammed into her, throwing her to the ground. The air exploded with another muffled crack of the pistol. The round caught the guard low and he buckled and fell, staining the dirt and gravel with his blood as he went. His moans of pain were joined by a startled cry from the group.

  The pistol flew out of Jessie’s hand and disappeared beneath the bus. Grant jumped to his feet, pulling her up by her backpack. Without thinking, she accelerated into the movement, building momentum, and launched herself at the man. The motion threw him off balance, and he began to pinwheel his other arm to stay on his feet. Unsnapping the straps, Jessie spun out of the backpack and grabbed a hold of it herself and jerked him back. She brought a knee up as he came and smashed it into his wrist. He yelped in pain and let go.

  “What are you doing?” he panted, as he circled her. He shook out the arm she’d kneed, and managed to look both surprised and disappointed. “You just killed an innocent man.”

  “If he dies, it’s on you,” Jessie snarled. “Stay back!”

  “She’s got my EM pistol!” the driver shouted.

  But Jessie had already slipped her hand into the cargo pocket. She pulled it out and aimed it toward the group’s center of mass and pulled the trigger. There was no recoil, just a pop and a slight buzzing in her head. The air in front of her seemed to waver for a moment. The bodies fell as a unit, hitting the ground where they stood.

  All but Grant. He had dove out of the path of the EM blast and was now scrambling beneath the bus.

  Without waiting to see if he’d find her grandfather’s pistol, Jessie sprinted over to the portal, snatching one of the Live Players’ packs off the ground as she went to replace her own, and entered the darkness within. She didn’t know if she’d get through, if her side would close or the other would open automatically as they had done before. The last time she’d been through one, Micah had activated it. She still didn’t know exactly how they worked.

  Footsteps crunched on the gravel outside.

  “Close, damn it!” she screamed at the blank walls. She backed herself into the furthest corner. But nothing happened.

  Jessie raised the EM pistol and trained it at the opening. Grant stepped into it, a hulking silhouette against the bus’s headlights. “Don’t come any closer,” she warned him. “Unless you want a headache for a souvenir.”

  Grant stopped, and Jessie wondered if he could see her inside the wall.

  “You and I both know that EM pistol has one shot before it needs to recharge.”

  “Or maybe I had more than one EM pistol.”

  “You won’t knock me out. You need me to stop the bleeding on the guard out here. Unless you want him to die.”

  Jessie didn’t answer.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “How is he?”

  “He’ll live. The bullet entered his leg.”

  “Let me go,” she said. “Please.”

  He sighed and shook his head. His arm swung forward and he tossed something in, eliciting a flinch from her. The small but heavy object hit the dirt near her feet. “You’re not going to last very long with just a handful of bullets,” he said. Reaching over to the side, he plucked her pack up off the ground and added it to her grandfather’s pistol. “Or a couple of bamboo sticks.”

  “I’ve done more with less.”

  “I don’t know why you’re doing this,” he said, and she thought he sounded sad. “Or what you think you’re going to accomplish.”

  “That’s because you see this as just a game, Grant. It’s anything but a game for me.”

  He turned his head to the side, and for just a moment she could see a little bit of his face. There was no anger or hatred on it. Not even the smug confidence of the man she’d met the previous afternoon. He looked . . . thoughtful. Maybe even a little bit jealous.

  “Why are you letting me go?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he told her, “I give you three days. And that’s being generous.”

  He stepped to the side and reached over to something on the wall. There was a click and a low rumble and the opening began to shrink and, for just a moment, Jessie felt as if the ceiling itself was lowering over her, about to crush her, and she yelped before realizing it was a rolling door.

  “Three days,” he said, “then I’m coming after you myself.”

  ‡ ‡ ‡

  Chapter 52

  Jessie still couldn’t think of Kwanjangnim Rupert as a mindless zombie. She had trained under the man for years, had learned how to fight and defend herself under his careful and caring tutelage. Had even learned how to redirect her emotions away from the reckless, futile traps she’d always find herself stumbling into. He had spent countless hours teaching her how to channel her energy toward more productive ends.

  This had been Rupert’s hardest challenge, Jessie knew, teaching her techniques to help her unclog her thoughts during times of extreme duress. Teaching her how to focus on weaving through her obstacles rather than always trying to bash her head against them. She’d never mastered the techniques. In fact, she had given up in frustration so many times that it was a wonder why he never gave up on her.

  Now she wondered, and not for the first time since the sun had risen, if maybe she was just being overly sentimental in bringing him along with her. She should’ve just left him where she found him, standing in the shadows beneath the collapsed sheet metal roof of a long-abandoned carport. It had been more of a hassle than she had expected. Like trying to walk a new puppy that had to stop every few feet to smell something new or to pee or dig.

  Not that the Player that was once her hapkido master was doing any of those sorts of things, but it did keep stopping. She’d get him moving again and he’d walk a few hundred feet, then stop, as if he forgot what he was doing. And she’d have to stop herself and turn around and consciously make him start walking. Again. And again.

  It took all of her concentration and, in this place when her attention needed to be focused on her surroundings, she couldn’t afford to divide it.

  The training she’d undergone the previous afternoon had been just as frustrating— for both her and Rodney, her group instructor. And although Rod (“The Bod” as a few of the other female students and one male one had called him, though Jessie didn’t think he was all that good-looking) hadn’t said it in so many words, she could tell he considered her some kind of gaming moron. Compared with the other Operators, she just couldn’t seem to get used to the new interface.

  The gear was nothing like anything she’d ever used before. It was more intuitive, rather than conscious, and she was having trouble with the whole idea that she needed to stop trying to direct the Player with her body and just let her mind think of the Player as an extension of it. Plus, the visual overlay from her optic implant was giving her a headache.

  “Don’t try to focus your eyes on the image,” Rod had told her. “It won’t work. The image is transferred directly to the optic nerve by the implant in your left cheek. You have to teach your brain to parse the two inputs individually. Takes practice, but by the end of the week, you’ll have it.”

  What about by the end of the day?

  She was tempted to tap the implant off. But if she was going to get used to it, she needed to give it time.

  The afternoon had been focused on physical movements, on getting her mind to package her intentions for the Player’s actions.

  “Each time you think about walking, or lifting a finger, or putting on your
shoes, you don’t consciously think through the steps, and yet your body performs these tasks flawlessly ninety-nine point nine percent of the time. In fact, it’s when you start to think about the mechanics of walking that you stumble.”

  “Muscle memory,” Jessie had offered, and rather grumpily, too. She was losing patience with her clumsiness, and the time seemed to be slipping away in massive chunks. The half-baked plan in her head needled at her, seeking attention she couldn’t afford to give it.

  “The brain still has to send the command, beginning from the movement which initiates the series of actions, and ending with the movement which concludes them. How do you think the brain does all this as efficiently as it does?” He didn’t even wait for any of the students to answer. “In pre-coded packets of information, that’s how. When you’re playing Zpocalypto, or playing at some sport—” He interrupted himself to ask Jessie, “Do you have a preferred sport?”

  “Hapkido.”

  His eyebrows had knitted and he had to ask her to explain what that was. Someone joked that it was a breed of dog. When she told him, he’d seemed reluctantly impressed.

  “Martial arts is a fine example of what I’m talking about. So much of it is like a dance. It’s about your brain processing visual, positional, and situational stimuli and then responding with an appropriate action within fractions of a second. When you’re practicing—”

  “Sparring,” she said. “It’s called sparring.”

  “When you’re sparring, you don’t stand there and think to yourself: ‘My opponent is standing three feet away from me and is going to kick me with his left leg, so I need to either block it or jump out of the way, and if I jump then I need to jump over this way, which means I need to prepare to land on this foot and then spin around and punch him with this hand. You don’t think any of that, you just do it.”

  “It’s reflex,” Jessie said, over the giggles of a few students.

  “No, it’s not. When a doctor taps above your knee and your foot shoots out, that’s a reflex. The brain isn’t involved in that at all. Here, the commands must originate from the brain. You’re not aware of it, not consciously attempting to think your way through some set of motions. And that’s exactly how we must train your mind to operate your Player, not as a tool or a machine, but as an extension of yourself, because that thing inside that room?” He pointed. “When you’re connected, using this new generation gear and the auditory and optic implants, that thing becomes a part of you.”

  Jessie’s stomach had lurched at the idea. It was—

  disturbing

  —creepy.

  But despite her personal feelings on the subject, despite her personal connection with the subject, she couldn’t help but be thrilled whenever she managed even the tiniest achievement. And it was the strangest thing to watch, too. She’d think: Take a step. And it would just stand there and she’d get frustrated and try harder and, of course, nothing would happen. But if she just relaxed and thought about it walking — not her, but it — her Player would. Or she’d imagine it reaching out, and its arm would lift. She hadn’t sent the instructions, not consciously.

  Only later did she realize that it would prefer to use its left arm. Rupert had been right-handed. It was she who was left-handed.

  Creepy and disturbing. But also fascinating.

  It wasn’t until around four in the afternoon that she had finally managed to get Rupert — Player! — to cross the room with any fluidity, open the door and retrieve the third shelf object. Which, ironically, or perhaps amusingly (to everyone but her), happened to be a rubber replica of a human brain.

  The next several hours had been devoted to building on the catalogue of movements, then repeating them while the instructor gave her separate instructions for her to perform at the same time. Someone suggested they try walking their Player while chewing gum.

  “The advantage of the new gear is that you can go about your own business at home or work while playing The Game. Gone are the boots and the gloves. Gone are the goggles. You could be making dinner and playing; your spouse wouldn’t be the wiser.”

  “Driving?”

  “We don’t recommend that. But you could be out for your daily jog in the park. For a bit more aerobic benefit, to get your heart racing a little faster, you might try connecting and playing.” He turned to Jessie. “Someday you may even be able to play while you’re doing your happy-do thing.”

  Hapkido, asshole.

  “What about while you’re having sex?” someone asked.

  Rod-the-Bod shrugged. “That’s a little weird for me, but who am I to judge?”

  Jessie had shuddered in disgust. She couldn’t wait for the training to end.

  But eight o’clock rolled around and they were still at it. Then nine, and Jessie was beginning to fear she’d miss the shuttle going out that night. And with every minute that passed, she grew more and more certain that someone would interrupt the class and march in with officers to take her into custody.

  But finally, around nine-thirty, Rod told them that they’d all done well, and that it was time to progress to the next level: “Remote control. We’re sending your Players into the arcade tonight. We’ll start fresh again at eight tomorrow morning. That’s it. Get a good night’s sleep.”

  She had been ready to collapse in exhaustion right then, but she couldn’t risk missing the bus. She didn’t know if there would be another shuttle the next night. Most of all, she could almost feel CR bearing down on her.

  Now, as the sun finally managed to clear the treetops to her right and began to bake the morning’s dew from the surface of the road, she looked back on everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, and realized that it could’ve gone much worse at any number of points.

  Looking ahead, the temperature might top out somewhere between a hundred and five and a hundred and ten before she reached Jayne’s Hill. The road might even become too hot to walk, melting the rubber on the bottoms of her sneakers. She hadn’t slept in nearly three days, and she badly needed to rest. And already she was running out of water. But when she turned to check for the zombie that had once been her teacher, to her surprise it was still following her.

  It was hard not to be optimistic.

  ‡ ‡ ‡

  Chapter 53

  Eric stepped up the cement stairs fronting the police station and pushed through the glass doors. He flashed his badge at the desk sergeant, who nodded in recognition. “Captain’s in her office. She wants to see you right away.”

  Eric frowned. If Harrick was leaving instructions for the desk sergeant, then it couldn’t be good.

  He hurried through the station feeling as if every eye was on him. Nearly every one was.

  Harrick was on her Link. He could see her through the glass wall encasing her office, pacing behind her desk, the Link in one hand up to her ear and her other hand on her hip. She glanced up and waved him in.

  “Have a seat.”

  The officers called it The Hot Seat, the chair directly to the left of the door. Since joining the department as an NCD officer, then as its lead investigator, Eric had had plenty of opportunity to sit in it over the past four years. He’d been chewed out plenty of times, castigated, emasculated, threatened and undermined. But he wasn’t the only one. That was how things operated around here. Harrick was the mother hen, and she ruled the roost with an iron wing.

  He was well aware that she respected him and his team less than she did the regular officers under her command. It wasn’t apparent in her public interactions, however. Nor had she ever used his family history as a means to degrade him. She took her duties to protect and serve all Greenwich’s denizens, living and dead, seriously.

  The same could not be said, however, for the officers who served under her. Not a week would go by without some kind of cruelty inflicted upon him, which the officers shrugged off as friendly hazing. Eric had never complained. Not once.

  “Okay. Keep me updated,” Harrick said, and discon
nected the ping. She stared at the Link for a moment before slipping it into her pocket. “Today it’s Buffalo. Full lockdown. Arc’s not just keeping mum on this one, they’re trying to get in front of it by accusing their Citizen Registration department of faulty installs.”

  She sat down, sighing. “It’s getting bad out there, Daniels. Arc is going to have an uprising on their hands if they don’t do something quick.”

  Eric nodded, but didn’t speak. He hoped she’d give details, but he also knew she wouldn’t. Buffalo wasn’t why she’d called him in from the hospital.

  As if remembering this detail herself, she looked up at him and asked, “How’s your mother?”

  “Dialysis this morning. And they’re identifying potential donors in the registry, in case her own kidneys don’t kick in.” He sighed. “But, to be honest, they’re not even sure she’d survive a transplant right now. It’s touch and go.”

  Harrick nodded. “I’m sorry to hear that. Let me know if I can do anything to help.”

  “The Casey kid,” Eric started to say, but Harrick raised her hand to stop him.

  “I know what you’re going to say.”

  Eric doubted that. If he told the captain his sister’s theory, she’d lock him up for sure. Part of it was her faith in Arc’s claim that their systems and devices were impossible to hack— although that might be eroding now. But he was also sure some of her unwillingness to go there had to do with happenings behind the scenes. Nobody achieved a position as she had without being bought and paid for by Arc itself. So, as much as Harrick shunned any association of the company in public, as much as she badmouthed them here in her office, Eric had no doubt she was in Arc’s pocket on the side. He couldn’t make such a wild claim as Jessie’s without something incontrovertible to support it.

  “I need to talk to you about your sister.”

  Eric’s head snapped up. “Jessie?” He hadn’t told anyone what she was trying to do, had only mentioned his last conversation with her to Kelly. To their utter surprise, it seemed she’d somehow succeeded in getting into Gameland, since the last few times he’d tried to ping her Link, the message he’d gotten back was that it was no longer on the stream. At this very moment, Kelly was sitting at home, ready to execute Jessie’s instructions. “What about her?”