Kei

  “What’s the plan?” I ask as the hoversled screams along an avenue, then banks into a side street running along next to a forested park.

  “‘Plan?’” Anton snorts. “Try not to die.”

  “Good plan,” I admit.

  The hovercraft lurches just before we pass an alley, climbing sharply, and we all duck as a burst of fire erupts from the opening and mostly shoots under us, the rest skittering across our blue plasma envelope. I blink at the tiny lightnings arcing over the golden sphere, only a couple feet from my face. The globe takes on a faint-blue tinge, almost like another layer of plasma circulating inside the main energy sheath.

  “We think this is some kind of malware or hostile takeover of the simulation AI,” Chris says over his shoulder as we zoom down the streets. “But the AI is actually multiple agents of multiple AIs, so whatever’s in here doesn’t have absolute control. The AIs aren’t all focused on the sim, and some are pretty peripheral, like the optional bioscanners. Someone would be trying to seize whole server farms to get every one, and they wouldn’t go quietly. And the AIs tasked with protecting them definitely wouldn’t.”

  “So we have a window,” Andrea summarizes, checking screens on the dash beside Chris. “How much we don’t know, but playing this game with us means playing a much larger game with the world. One they can’t win.”

  “We hope,” Chris mutters dryly. “But those are definitely the odds, no matter how powerful they are. For now.”

  “For now,” I repeat. “So what now?”

  “Now,” Anton answers. “We hit the Citadel.” He points at the black obelisk, which seems to be in its original position, only hovering slightly above it, the ground below covered by a steadily rising fortress arcology – a city formed out of one interconnected structure. The city-building shines a gleaming white with touches of steel and silver. Intimidating, if it were real.

  Vexing, as it is not. This is going to be a long game. Or a broken one.

  “These sigils,” Chris asks, “what do they look like?”

  I pause. “Familiar.”

  They all look at me oddly. But I’m silent for a few moments, straining in the blackness of my empty memories. Where? I close my eyes, trying to concentrate.

  Memories of a boy, a chessboard and a great hall glimmer briefly in my thoughts, and are gone.

  I shook my head. “Nothing.” I glanced around, grabbing a handy grab bar as the hoversled dove just before passing another alley. This time the plasma streaked over us. A burst of fire from Anton’s swiveling weapon struck robots at the same time, and then we were past it.

  “Sorry,” I add.

  Anton snorts. “Pretty sure we should be apologizing to you. Except we’re kind of busy. But this should be impossible, or close enough.” His next barrage is a staccato burst of angry thunderbolts, and takes out a flight of drones coming over a row of townhouses in explosions of sparks and shrapnel and flakes of flame. My ears are still ringing as the last of them fall.

  “What happens if we die here?” I ask.

  Andrea sighs. “Theoretically, nothing.” She’s tapping a commlink on her armored wrist, clearly trying to call out or access some system or other. And just as clearly getting nowhere.

  “But also theoretically, if you’re ‘dead,’” Chris adds, “even the uncorrupted parts of the simulation will treat you that way. So you lose this instance of yourself, and either can’t move or don’t respawn. And I’m pretty sure we don’t want to risk transferring our consciousness somewhere fully under our intruder’s control.”

  I nod. “That would be bad,” I agree.

  For the next two or three minutes, we keep darting down fairly open avenues and approaches where ambushes might be harder. It’s hard to say, but this craft is moving faster than a sports car, probably hundreds of kilometers an hour, or a couple hundred MPH. It’s also high maneuverable, and our seats sway and turn slightly with sudden movements, dampening inertia’s grip as we bounce from one direction to the next. I’m guessing our armor is helping, too, or the simulation doesn’t bother with the full impact of traveling like a caffeinated ping-pong ball.

  We shoot down a side alley, and the bots there barely have time to fire back at Anton’s assault before Chris has plowed through them. Then we’re in the next street, turn at a right angle almost instantly, and shoot into the park we’d seen earlier. And Chris is darting among the trees with impossible speed and agility. I wonder how much of this is skill with the game itself, versus familiarity with the default terrain.

  We don’t crash anyway.

  “Not sure how much the Intruder managed to redeploy when we came in,” Chris says as we sail up to crash through the foliage of an apple tree with pulses of plasma singing beneath us and then dive back down again to shelter under some oaks as more fire rakes the treetops. “But some areas usually don’t have that many troops to start with.”

  The jet engines beneath us roar, and if I thought we were going fast before, I struggle to breathe as our speed triples. After a moment, I’m able to draw air into my lungs. Our forcefield is struggling also, rippling in the wind and shuddering whenever leaves or twigs brush it.

  I glance at the others, but they seem unperturbed, at least by the speed. Andrea is pointing out things to a nodding Chris, and Anton is chewing on an apple as he swings his weapon around to cover all sightlines. Which amounts to everything but the ground at this point.

  Then we burst from the last line of trees, almost to the black obelisk, and we can see where all robots have gone to.

  Right in front of us.

  Endless waves of gleaming metal infantry surge between us and the obelisk. And even beneath its floating base, and beyond it.

  The tide has finally come in, and that tide is metal.

  Our hovercraft drops with a lurch and skims just above the ground, Anton’s cannon firing a continuous stream of raging plasma just above our heads. I can see the infantry locking onto us, but we’re hitting level ground, which means we’ve gone instantly from being in clear view of every metal man before us, to just the direct line of sight of the front row.

  Anyone else will be threading the needle of their fire past the heads of everyone before them.

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  I see Chris’ tactic instantly. Unfortunately, so do the machines.

  The first row drops prone. The second, to their knees. The third just levels their rifles.

  Or at least, that appears to be the plan. The sweeping arc of fire from Anton’s weapon turns this gambit, and the first three rows of bots, into molten fragments.

  They still sort of do it. The first row does fall prone. They just don’t move afterwards. The second does fall to their knees. And sometimes keep falling. Or just parts of them do.

  The third does level its rifles – putting the most explosive thing on them right in the path of a beam obviously hot enough to vaporize steel. Predictably enough, they explode.

  By the time the smoke and showering debris begin to settle, Anton’s beam is sweeping back through again.

  And for a moment, I think we’ve got them.

  Then the air between us and the obelisk fills with giant, glowing runes, and the machines surge forward again. No longer like a raging tide. More like heat lightning.

  The world… speeds up. One moment, the robotic troops are struggling to keep up with a rapidly changing battlefield – devastating plasma fire, their own weapons detonating, the continuous rain of their comrades’ metal bodies falling on them as shredded shrapnel.

  And then I am feeling my mind growing still, my body distant, the world fading around me as the hypnotic power of the sigils steals through me. I close my eyes, but realize that I, at least, am not driving or firing. I can afford to look away for a moment. Chris and Anton cannot.

  I peer immediately through slitted eyelids, trying to glimpse my friends and our attackers without seeing more of the writing in the sky just before us. I see Anton firing, perhaps blindly, into the army which has crossed the space between us and is almost upon us. Chris seems to be watching a screen on the dash through narrowed eyes, looking down from the scrawled lights upon the open air – this alien language which seems written upon our very souls.

  And Andrea… Andrea finishes tapping something into a keyboard in front of her, and instantly the faint, transparent blue forcefield sphere around our hoversled blazes into a brilliant blue too bright to look at, and almost impossible to see through.

  “That won’t last long,” she tells us, as the first waves of robots hit the field and hammer against it, or are hammered by it. I have a feeling we’re crashing through their wave of death like a giant bowling ball. I wonder if this simulated machine is really supposed to have enough power to sustain the field while literally kicking in the afterburners on its jet.

  “We’re almost there!” Chris cries out as the hoversled lunges forward… and halts with a grinding crash.

  The sphere of blue light crackles around us, our last line of defense – and then collapses.

  The avalanche of metal lunges forward with impossible speed. I can see the black obelisk floating above us, only meters away as metal hands fall upon us.

  And as Andrea shouts, holding a smartphone. “Everyone, look!” she shouts. And a brilliant icon like a stylized hourglass appears upon it. Followed by an infinity sign, a spiral, a descending spiral staircase, a pyramid… and then an hourglass again.

  And then the world slows down, and I speed up.

  I’m out of my chair before I realize what I’m doing, yet I’m not moving purely on reflex. Some part of me – some much, much faster part of me – knows what I’m doing, and why, and has executed its own strategy before I can even grasp how many of the bots are falling upon me with hands, blades, guns.

  And then what they’re doing is irrelevant, because they’re no longer on the hoversled. I’m on my feet, the last standing bot now flying back into a knot of others on the ground just in front of us. Then striking with enough force to break the armored tide engulfing us.

  The sled manages one last lurch of speed, scattering the robotic shock troops before us like toys. And then the runes in the sky and the machines on the ground are swirling as well, as if an unseen wind is ripping through them, pulling them into a spiraling pattern not of their own making.

  The hoversled crashes to a halt directly beneath the obelisk, and Andrea shouts in triumph, an odd length of glowing crystal in her hand.

  “Contact achieved!” she announces, waving the crystal. And a fresh tide of machines sweeps over the sled, and all of us.

  “And goal achieved also,” says a smooth, artificial voice from the air around us. “Congratulations, participants. Your contribution stands recognized.”

  The horizon shatters in every direction. The sky beyond doesn’t so much tear as splinter in a great, silent wind, revealing an infinite blackness. Not the void of space, but the void of nothing at all.

  As though the simulation has given up on this false world, and is converging on us.

  Us, and the obsidian obelisk above us, which now glistens like volcanic glass held before a raging white fire. A fire which disturbs its immutable darkness.

  A whirr and a click, and the obsidian shaft makes a quarter turn above us. I see these things only because the movement of the world has slowed further, and even the accelerated bots seizing my limbs and crushing my windpipe seem sluggish. Sluggish, but still a multitude.

  “Interference… noted,” a deep voice remarks from all around us, different than the first one.

  The world flickers, and what remains of the army at our throats is now a splash of silver on everything – our crumpled armor, the broken hoversled, and miles of grass and trees all around us. Everything but the obelisk itself, floating above the fray. Detached from this reality.

  But not our fate. “Consciousness retrieval executing. Return of players to full consciousness, within safe parameters.” A pause. “Farewell,” the voice adds diffidently, as if empathy were something it had heard of before, but never really grasped.

  And just like that, we’re back in our real bodies. I rip the goggles and earphones off my head instantly, and see Anton, Andrea and Chris doing the same.

  “What,” I gasp, “was that?”

  Christopher shakes his head. “Intrusion, like we said, though how something that comprehensive could even happen… It shouldn’t be possible.”

  “No, not that,” I say. “Those icons on your smartphone, right at the end.”

  Andrea looks at me, glances from Christopher to Anton, and then nods, as if she’s come to a conclusion.

  “We were being overwhelmed,” she says, “and if whatever was doing this got a hold of any of us, much less all of us – we might have never been the same. Maybe never free again, if it was really trying to rewrite our minds.”

  “So why do that with your smartphone?” I ask. “And why did it affect me.”

  “We went through some… unique schooling, growing up,” Anton says. “Which had a lot of benefits, and a few questionable side effects.”

  “One of which includes buried post-hypnotic suggestions,” Chris adds.

  “Suggestions?” I tilt my head, questioning.

  “We had deep training in a bunch of powerful techniques. The right triggers can send us right back into them, automatically. Drop them in the right sequence, and it’s like running a program.”

  “A program which, in this case, amplifies our abilities in general, but one in particular,” Andrea says.

  “Our subjective. Experience. Of Time.” Anton looks deadly serious for once, and given what I felt in the simulation, I can understand why.

  I think about that. “Okay, that explains why you used it. But why use it on me? And why did it work on me?”

  “We think you may have had similar training to the rest of us. It’s hard to say, with your amnesia. And Yoshi Kimura isn’t the kind of guy to play secret mindgames. But if you did, it was possible you could be enhanced the same way.”

  “Mindgames?” I ask.

  Andrea nods. “We found the sequences, they weren’t given to us. We weren’t even told about them. So we use them when necessary, but we’ve adapted them.”

  “Getting any brainwashing triggers out where we can,” Christopher adds.

  “And trying to reverse engineer the designs wherever possible,” Andrea says.

  “And figuring out what kind of strategic thinking was behind all this. If any.” Anton shrugs.

  “And what you did to me…?” Kei raises a dubious eyebrow.

  “Mix a’stuff. Mostly deepening the hypnotic state without knocking us out, and then accelerating our perception of time.”

  “Accelerating what?”

  Christopher holds up an iPad in front of them and begins slowly scrolling through the opening of ‘War and Peace.’ “For every real-world second that passes,” Chris explains as the text scrolls by, “we experience 15, 30 even 60 seconds.” He holds down the ‘Page Down’ button. Suddenly the text accelerates, until it’s blurring past, unreadable.

  To normal eyes.

  “With enough adrenaline you can pull or tear muscles,” Anton says, “even if you’ve got the reflexes to keep up. No such problem when your body’s a videogame character, though.”

  “It’s much more potent when you’re studying,” Andrea clarifies, gesturing at the racing text on Chris’ iPad. “But in the game, it was the only card we had left to play.”

  “So we played it. Or Andi did.”

  “Andrea,” Andrea corrects him.

  “Right,” Anton sighs.

  “Wait,” Kei says, “so you can study up to 60 times faster?”

  “No,” Anton corrects her. “We can accelerate our studies in all kinds of other ways, and then multiply that speed 60-times over.”

  “We can use hypnosis to speed up your subjective time – the time you experience – by 60 to 1 compared to chronological time – the time that actually passes.” Chris tapped the screen and the blurring text slowed to readable speed. “Basically you experience 1 minute of time for every second that passes.”

  “It’s really helpful for reading and studying,” Anton said. “Feels weird, but it works. Throw in some decent speed reading and you can learn even faster.”

  “But it’s real value is accelerating your subjective time for VR learning,” Andrea added. “The physical world can’t keep up with a 60/1 acceleration. With enough processing power, VR can. With good enough algorithms, you can model learning in the real world.”

  “And toss in some accelerated learning, and that speeds up even further, also.” Anton shrugged. “So why not?”

  I nod. “Okay. That makes sense at least.”

  Anton stares at me. “Any of this sounding familiar, yet?”

  I start to shake my head, then pause. Something about it does sound familiar, like the distant echo of a conversation I’ve had, and perhaps will continue to have, again and again, until I get it right. Or perhaps forever.

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