8
November 24th.
Matt Burke:
I step over a dead Wab who’s got a jagged chunk of resonant tubing sticking through his neck. I catch myself snickering at the obvious irony: a piece of his own dumbass uber-weapon killed him when it blew apart.
Datascan did a good job of reconstructing the Athens’ Metro tunnel, even down to all the scattered bits of blasted sound-weapon. A half-dozen well-rendered bodies lie where they fell, complete with accurate blast and gunshot wounds. My visor even renders the smoke and powder smells. It’s almost exactly like I remember it.
But with a few glaring differences: it’s quiet. The Wabs are all already dead. And there are no squads of jumpy CT troops swarming in.
There’s just him. Pretty much like I found him when it was real: sitting slumped against a bullet-battered column. Same gray coat and hat. Only he’s not bleeding this time.
Just sitting there. Looking tired. A pistol hanging in each hand. He lazily turns his head when he catches sight of me out of the corner of his interface glasses. Smiles a limp half-smile.
“You’re late,” he mutters, more to himself than to me.
“Am not,” I say defensively. “It’s not like I have any control of when they insert me into these things.”
He raises an eyebrow, seems to take more notice. Surprised (as much as he can be with the drugs, I suppose). Incredulous. Then I realize: he isn’t expecting me to be “real,” isn’t expecting anything other than AI-generated sim characters.
He reaches out with the gun in his left hand and pops me. The digital shell passes through my avatar and smacks the concrete behind me with decent realism.
“Okay, that was rude,” I scold him. But at least they didn’t make it hurt.
He chuckles under his breath. “Does this mean you’re really here?”
“Yes… Well, no… Well… Neither are you,” I burble, flummoxed by the techno-existentialism. “But I am inserted into this sim, just like you are. Fake body, real me. Trust me: I’m not just a figment of the Hal running the show.”
“Prove it,” he challenges. And he almost pisses me off before I catch the smile and realize he’s fucking with me.
“Can’t. You’ll just have to wait until we’re out.”
“Sounds good. Beer’s on me. Assuming I ever have access to beer or money.”
I like him. I realize that. He scares the crap out of me, but I like him. I also realize that should worry me quite a bit.
“Matthew, right?” he confirms. I nod. He gets himself up. It looks like it takes him some effort. But then he shakes out his left leg and checks it. “I managed not to get myself shot this time,” he says with bemused half-pride. He looks over the realistically rendered carnage.
“How many times have you run this?” I have to ask.
“Ten or fifteen. I think. Things get pretty fuzzy between simulations.”
“That would be the drugs.”
He nods. “They told me. And not really sleeping. How long have I been under?”
“No idea,” I play dumb because I don’t want to be the one to tell him he’s been in Neverland the better part of a month. “What day was it when you started?”
“No idea.” He wanders slowly through the scene, kicking at debris that skitters very convincingly. “I seem to be getting better, though.” He taps his glasses with the barrel of the space-gun in his right hand. “It’s kind of like gaming, I guess: the first few times you play a new VR you have to get used to the graphics and controls. Then you get the feel of it, stop struggling and start playing.”
I remember what Henderson told me about him getting discreet “help” from Datascan with the real Wabs in the real Athens.
“You had AI tactical feed when you crashed this for real, didn’t you?”
He nods. “Had no idea what it was, of course. Still not sure why it helped me.”
There’s what I’ve been told and what I suspect. I keep both to myself.
“It made a hell of a difference, though,” he admits. “Got me in here with realtime maps that placed every one of the bastards for me, then kept track of them when the shooting started. Let me shoot blind, targeted them through solid barriers, told me when to shoot and when to duck. It made it almost too easy. Definitely saved my stupid ass.”
He twirls the stupid-big gun in his right hand like a quick-draw artist and drops it in his thigh rig. The smaller .45 in his left goes in a clamshell at the small of his back, up under the armored gray overcoat. I get a close enough look to confirm: these aren’t the guns he had in Athens—these are the same guns from his place in Phoenix.
“So what did you think of it?” he says, tapping his glasses again, this time with a fingertip.
“What do you mean?”
“They had me run a reconstruction of your Metro station shootout—I guess the video they got was good enough to make a simulation out of it. I assumed you had tactical heads-up feed too, since the sim has it. So? What did you think of it?”
“I… It was… Odd.”
He grins at me—a real grin this time (at least avatar-real). Then gets quiet again, looking at the reconstructs of the Wabs he killed.
“So what are you doing here?” he asks me straight.
“No idea,” I have to admit. “Invited, I guess. Well, maybe ‘invited’ isn’t strong enough a word for it…”
“Manticore?”
I nod.
“Candidate? Or are you part of running the show?”
“Candidate,” I admit uneasily.
He softens. Like it makes sense. Or maybe he’s somehow glad I’m here, in it with him. I realize I’m probably the closest thing to a friendly face he’s seen since they jumped him in. (Henderson doesn’t count.)
“They’re really going to do this, then?”
“Apparently.” I sound as wary as he does. “Bullet-proof super-suits. X-Ray vision. Flying on wires. We’ll be friggin’ super heroes. I should have a big ‘B’ on my chest…”
“Action heroes.”
“What?”
“Action heroes,” he says with an odd mix of conviction and sarcasm. “Super heroes have powers. Superman. Spider-man. Action heroes have skills, maybe toys. But they’re just people.”
“Like Batman,” I connect back to our last conversation, which just happened to be in the real world version of this very place and time. He half-smiles at my response, but then goes back to somber quick, pulling out that stupidly big gun of his and hefting it like it’s the weight of the world.
“Not quite,” he has to say.
I stand there with him for a while in the simulated battleground, not sure where to go from here. The sim keeps running, like Datascan’s only point is to give us a quiet and familiar place to chat. So I just ask him:
“So. What happens now?”
He sad-smiles and shakes his head again. “I think the next step is they kill me. To make it official and all. Maybe they’ll let you watch.”
He sees it first: the sim begins to swirl in the backgrounds and dissolve.
“It was good to see you again,” he says goodbye with tired resignation.
“Wait…!” I try, but he’s gone, it’s gone, all gone.
Grayman Book One: Acts of War Page 25
