Fallout (Lois Lane) (20 page)

“Here comes the cavalry,” I said.

The elevator came to a smooth halt, and I tried to prepare myself for whatever came next. When the doors opened onto the fifth floor, I stepped out, crossing my fingers that SmallvilleGuy had counted the beeps on the recording correctly.

Gone was the bright white and sterile air of the lobby and the top floor. This was more like the hall to the Morgue. Well, not quite
that
bad, but close enough.

Everything was clean, but the walls were a light gray and the overhead lights seemed purposefully dull, casting a low, diffuse glow that made everything look like part of a nightmare.

The question was, where on this floor were they?

I pocketed the key from the elevator and moved farther into the hallway, listening as hard as I could. I took care to keep my thick boot soles from making noise, and I swung my messenger bag around so that it was accessible.

The first room that had voices coming from inside also had an open door, and I paused outside it. From where I stood, I could see a row of techs manning a bank of flat screens and keyboards and other equipment. They were also miked with headsets that curled around in front of their lips, presumably to allow communication with whoever was on the other side of the wall of one-way glass they stared at. The men at the controls were typing or adjusting knobs, swearing excitedly and nodding their heads at what was beyond the glass. There was one woman among them, but she wasn’t talking nearly as much as the others, her face pinched in disapproval.

I couldn’t see through the one-way glass from this angle, but it seemed like a safe enough bet this was the control room for the experiment. And that the rest of the workers running it, with that one disapproving exception, were far more gung ho than the man from the recording, the one SmallvilleGuy had been in contact with through the developer forum.

Judging from their chatter, today’s session was in full swing. There might have been things to learn from eavesdropping on them, but today wasn’t only about discovery. It was about disruption.

I kept going, continuing up the hall. If I was right, the one-way glass meant the next room would be the one I needed to find. I’d see Project Hydra in full-throttle mode.

I pulled aside the flap of my messenger bag and moved to the next doorway, which was also open.

And I stopped, gaping at what I saw in front of me. Had I somehow stepped out of reality and into the game?

But it wasn’t the game in any way I’d ever seen it.

CHAPTER 25

The room was dark
except for an illuminated scene in the middle of it, one filled with dust and desert and rattling explosions and muted screams—or, rather, a holo-scape version of those things that looked and sounded real until I blinked.

Until I looked harder to see what was really going on, and reminded myself that I
wasn’t
in the game. I was standing right here.

The floor of the hall was solid under my feet, and my hand was braced against the doorjamb. When I moved it to pinch my other arm, to be sure I was right, it
hurt
.

But I didn’t let a sound escape. No one noticed I was there. Not the miked project manager in the room or the Warheads arrayed in a circle of chairs around the scene. Everyone was too riveted to the experiment underway. I edged around the room, staying in the shadows and taking it all in, doing my best to understand what this was.

The tech might be similar to the game’s—the Warheads had on holosets that resembled to the ones I’d worn—but it wasn’t quite the same. This was a whole new sinister fourth world brought into being. One simply about war, with a tableau of a desert battle.

The game was the clear jumping-off point, but instead of the holosets projecting the war sim directly in front of their eyes, immersing them in it the usual way, these projected out, a spray of lights coalescing into the detailed scene in the center of the floor in front of the Warheads. That projection was what had thrown me off for those first confusing moments.

The lone researcher in the room held a clipboard and appeared to be conflicted as he watched the scene. He spoke up to give reluctant orders to the Warheads.

“Unit formation B,” he said. His was the voice from the other day. “Direct your avatars to infiltrate the compound to lay charges now.”

Devin and Anavi were in seats next to each other, slightly reclined, their lips moving occasionally.

The battle scenario on display was what people who played videogames thought warfare was like. But I knew better. I might hate bullies, but at that moment I hated the people at Advanced Research Laboratories more.

This was what I’d come here for. This was
it
. What I had to stop.

Inside the simulation, there were black-clad figures of soldiers, moving in a kind of sync that would be any commander’s glory. Here in the room, the Warheads had placid faces, divorced from feeling any of the fear and chaos, from the hot possibility that the sand would blow up under their feet and steal their lives, from everything actual soldiers in the field coped with every day.

They weren’t fighting one on one. No, that would be too easy.

The scene shifted, parts of it coming in and out of focus.

The Warheads were undertaking a group assault on a large compound. The power of them acting as individuals but part of one ingeniously strategic mind was a beautiful—and terrible—thing to witness. They raced toward the compound, and then into it, moving fearlessly throughout the scene, never a false step. A soldier’s form even shooed a little girl out of the way once they were inside, pushing her back toward the exit.

The guy monitoring the results spoke into the headset mike he was wearing, not raising his voice so the Warheads would take it as a command. “There’s one of the boss’s selling points. Humanitarian actions.”

He must be talking to the control room monitors. He didn’t sound like the compassion on display in the game was anything more than a kind of currency that their overlord would turn into profit.

My plan was a risk without SmallvilleGuy to help, even if it was a calculated one. Standing here, I knew it was worth taking.

It might work.

And Devin and Anavi—and the rest of the Warheads—would be hurt more by where this clearly illegal experiment was leading, if it wasn’t stopped.

You couldn’t conscript a group of teenage gamers into a “research project” on team gaming dynamics and then play around with their brains until you made them into a weapon. But Advanced Research Laboratories was attempting just that.

The man watched, sad and riveted, as the forms being directed by the Warheads raced around the scene. “They’re doing it—he’ll try to sell the military guys on this now for sure,” he said. “You can all say this is right, but it’s not. You’ll tell them that this group can direct the ground troops better than the best trained officers in the world could do on their own, and it’ll be true. They’d never have agreed, but once he shows them this, he’ll convince them to let us tech up real troops for these guys to drive in the field. He’ll make us do it.”

I almost gasped, but I managed to hold in the sound. Everything came together for me.

This wasn’t
just
about resurrecting the company’s old research into creating a fearless group consciousness, smarter and more strategic with its many minds. It was about bringing
all
the old research ideas they’d gotten in trouble for together. Reinventing it with the gaming creator’s technology and theories to make it a reality. The group mind in front of me was simply the first phase.

If what the man said was true, then the next step would be creating the capacity for the Warheads to control
actual
soldiers in the field. It was so far past wrong, so far past illegal . . . this was playing with people’s minds without bothering to give them a reason. It was stealing their lives. If the military said no, someone else would say yes. Other people with tasks that required intense planning, bad people with deep pockets who would want to be able to control the bodies they sent into the line of fire, or into a building to steal some priceless target.

Someone would always say yes.

I had to try to destroy this here, now, in its infancy, before it could go any further.

I slid my hands into my messenger bag and grappled gently to find the prism flare I’d brought with me, a treasure from Dad’s cache I hoped was significant enough to get this job done solo. At close quarters, it would be bright enough to blind everyone in the room temporarily.

A vibration distracted me.

My phone. I grabbed for it, looking up to make sure no one had spotted me.

The Warheads being in the sim continued to buy me cover, as it had kept any of them from noticing me lurking in the shadows. They were running a complicated formation in the first floor of the building—one soldier shot an enemy combatant wearing civilian clothes but wielding a rifle, and then the squad went into the room past him and planted small cylindrical objects in the corners.

“Now clear out of there,” Mr. Sympathetic commanded them. His attention was trained on the test subjects and their actions in the scene.

So I took a chance and checked my phone

SmallvilleGuy:
Ready? The researcher decided to help. Backup’s coming to cover you.

My knees went briefly weak with relief. He had my back after all.

I sent back:
When the tones start.

The two of us
had
to disrupt the audiovisual cue that synced the Warheads’ minds together and allowed the group link to occur in the real-sim—and, unbeknownst to those running the experiment, outside it. Doing it at the right time inside
and
outside the sim should break the bond as their neural pathways resealed to protect their minds. According to the game creator’s theory, at least.

That theory had better be right.

I deleted my messages with SmallvilleGuy so that no one could find them if I got caught, and then put my hands back in position on the fist-sized faceted cylinder of the flare. I continued to skirt the edges of the illuminated scene, waiting for our moment.

I watched as the black-clad troops left the compound and gathered together on the far side of a stretch of desert—cauterized by chaos, running civilians and commandos that were enemies in the simulation. They faced the large complex they’d been creeping around in, setting explosive charges.

They were about to make a successful strike in a zone that was the kind of populated area the military tried not to drop bombs on these days. And a series of charges set on-site, not just where it was convenient, but in the best possible places? That was an all-new level of accuracy, and would be far less controversial than drone strikes.

I stopped when I was right behind Sympathetic Experiment Man. This was all about to go down, for better or for worse.

A soldier in the simulation had a detonator in hand, waiting. Once the explosives went off, today’s simulation would likely end. We would have only the length of the audiovisual cue to get this done. It should be like the shock of coming out of the game too quickly, but magnified in effect. But if we missed the sync signal window, our chances were over.

“You guys seeing this?” the man said into his headset, low. He put his hand to his forehead and said solemnly, like it was the worst development imaginable, “This is it. Success. What are we doing?”

There must have been a response from the control room, because he lowered his hand from his head and raised his voice: “Blow the charges.”

I guess I’d see what kind of assistance the research man was willing to give to make this right.

The avatar in the scene who was holding the detonator pushed down on the top, and the compound exploded in a series of jarring booms.

My heart pounded, seeming as loud in my ears as the fake explosions. But it was as if I could hear the pitch they apparently planned to give the military—maybe even my dad? It would be all about saving civilian lives, with minimal risk to high-value assets (aka Project Hydra), because on-ground soldiers could take it all, at a much lower chance for human error.

There’d be no worries about soldiers not following orders to the letter, if their minds and bodies were being controlled—driven, the man had said—from afar. No more weaknesses in on-the-ground strategy and behavior. Not when the people making the decisions were safe in a suite like this. They might well be convinced.

But would anyone be asked to consent? Anavi and Devin hadn’t been. Anavi’s friend, the one the rest of the group had taken first when it started to expand, hadn’t been. In fact, from what I could tell none of the Warheads had ever been asked to do anything more than use real-sim tech, without the truth about what this experiment was intended to produce. The soldiers definitely wouldn’t be.

I’d done my homework for the story I wanted to write. Experiments of this nature, with zero informed consent? International law came down on them hard after World War II.

I looked at Anavi and Devin, beside each other, being forced to participate in this, whether they
knew
they were being forced or not. Their lives would be over if this experiment went forward. Their minds would never be their own.

“Get ready to bring them out,” the man said into his headset. He raised his voice, scrubbing a hand at the back of his neck. “Coming back in three . . . two . . . one . . .”

He started to turn around, and did a double take when he finally saw me standing there. “Who are you?”

“Me? I’m an interested party.” I steadied my hands on the flare. I was ready. But where was SmallvilleGuy? He’d said there would be help with the inside-the-sim part. “I’m here to stop this. Maybe you’re expecting me?”

The guy didn’t make a move, but something shifted in his face. It might have been approval. “You’re young,” he said, voice low. “I did what I told him I would in the sim, left the door wide open. He just had to put in the code I gave him, send the character to the right place. She’ll do the job.”

Before I had time to take in what that meant, the first of the tones sounded. The man stepped aside, clearing my way to the edge of the projection.

In the simulation, a round flying ship ringed with lights flew into place, the pattern cycling over and over. The Warheads began to lean forward, the eerie tones playing in sync with the lights’ visual music.

But the Warheads gasped and cringed back in their seats as Daisy the dragon flew wildly into the scene with a horrifying screech that drowned the tones, before shooting a missile directly into the ship.

Which exploded.

SmallvilleGuy had sent the cavalry, all right. He’d convinced the man to insert Daisy into the research scenario.

He hadn’t risked coming himself, but he’d gotten the help we needed. He’d completed his part in the plan.

The tones were still audible out here, cycling toward the end of the tune. The Warheads were recoiling from the fire in the real-sim, but they were watching it, trying to find the pattern they needed. The neural link must be fighting to stay alive.

Too bad.

I closed my eyes, because it was my turn.

I held the cylinder high overhead and yanked the pin free from the top, reveling in the dull boom that signaled the prism flare was activated and the extended flash of brighter-than-bright pinpoints of light on the backs of my eyelids as it blinded the room.

We’d disrupted the all-important signal, inside the game and out.
Please let the theory be right.

For Anavi and Devin’s sake.

Replacing the pin, I stashed the prism flare and stumbled in their direction, waiting until the pinpricks of light were gone before opening my eyes. When I did, I saw chaos nearly as impressive as that on the fake battlefield had been.

How much worse would this be if I was coming out of a shock—like when I’d been shot on my way out of the game?

“Devin? Anavi?” I asked, grabbing their hands. “I know that had to hurt, but you have to come with me. Breathe.”

I tugged and they rose to their feet, both of them wobbly. Devin blinked, and blinked some more, focusing on me as well as he could.

“Go! Security will be here any second,” the man said, his hands over his eyes.

Annddd
sure enough, an alarm began to sound, ringing and ringing and ringing.

“That’s our signal to get out of here,” I said.

“I’ll be okay . . . ” Devin shook his head once more, his eyes barely open. But he was there. “I can think. Anavi?”

She leaned against him, blinking.