Virtual War, page 7
“Twelve.”
“A full morning of practice has been lost because of this lie you told.”
“It’s only been a few minutes!”
“The matter must be pursued further. Be cautious from now on, Corgan. That is all I have to say to you.”
Corgan sat up, wet from sweat and tears. His gut felt raw, and his ears rang. His Box filled with images of the Isles of Hiva—palm trees with their broad leaves waving in the wind, the surf rushing up on sand and then rolling back. So it was all supposed to be over, and They were trying to soothe him with Hiva while They—did what? Went after Sharla! And Brig, too, probably!
Corgan paced his Box. He’d been forgiven quickly enough, or at least he was out of Reprimand. So Sharla and Brig ought to be forgiven, too. After all, the three of them were in it together. The other two would probably be questioned in Reprimand just as he’d been. It hadn’t been so bad, really. Yet, remembering it, his skin turned clammy. If nothing really terrible had been done to him, why did he feel so rotten?
He knew why. He’d betrayed the people he cared about. Not Mendor, not the Council. He’d betrayed Sharla and Brig.
A whole hour late, practice was about to begin.
“Where’s Sharla?” Corgan asked.
She appeared, even more out of focus than before. What a joke, Corgan thought, the way They make her look. Are you all right, he tried to ask her with his mind, but her eyes didn’t respond.
“What about Brig? Where’s Brig?” Corgan demanded.
“Brig is—not here. He won’t practice with you today.” Mendor spoke in a flat, unrevealing tone.
“Why?”
Mendor didn’t answer.
The tiny image of Shark’s face appeared close to Corgan’s eyes, as it had that one time before. “Keep quiet, don’t say anything,” the image told him. “Brig is still in Reprimand. They want him to tell why his LiteSuit got ripped, but he won’t talk. He’s really scared! They put me in Reprimand, too, but I’m used to it and I didn’t admit anything.”
Brig, that little crybaby, was holding out against Them? And Sharla hadn’t admitted anything. Only Corgan had! He stood up halfway as the Sharla face vanished.
So! The Supreme Council wanted honor? Mendor wanted truth? Fine! He’d give Them truth.
He shouted, “Sharla, listen to me! I told Them wha—”
Inhumanly high-pitched shrieking hit his eardrums with such force he felt as if he’d been thrown against a wall. The piercing sound paralyzed him while every visual image in his Box got snuffed out. Each pixel of color sputtered into darkness.
Corgan threw his arms over his ears to try to block the excruciating pain, but the sound kept blasting. “No!” he wailed, curling up in a ball. “Stop!” Nothing helped. The screeching shrilled louder and louder, stabbing his brain. His body shook in spasms. Then he thrashed with convulsions, his arms and legs lurching out at angles unnatural to human anatomy.
Suddenly it was over.
He lay helpless, unable to move, tears streaming from his eyes, blood from his nose, and moans from his lips.
“Get up. You’re not hurt,” Mendor the Father told him. “I never thought it would be necessary to use that kind of punishment on you, Corgan. But you were out of control.”
He must have lost track of time. Had he lost consciousness? Because now it was Mendor the Mother leaning over him, and Mendor had never been able to morph that quickly from Father to Mother. “Wipe your nose, dear boy. The bleeding’s already stopped. Here, take a sip of water,” she was telling him, but even before he could swallow, Mendor the Father loomed over him again.
Corgan squeezed his eyes tightly and then opened them, bewildered. “These are the rules!” Mendor the Father was saying harshly. “You will be given an hour to pull yourself together, to prepare for today’s practice. From now on, at practice, you will not speak without permission, unless you need to communicate with the other two members of your team about the practice session. Nothing else! You will focus all your attention on one objective: winning the War. Is that clear?”
Corgan nodded. Just that small movement made his head pound. Instantly Mendor the Mother was there, rubbing his forehead.
“From this moment forward,” Mendor the Father thundered, “you will obey all orders. You will always tell the truth. When the time comes, you will wage the War with honor. You must promise this.”
“I promise,” he whispered.
“You give your word? Good. I trust you.”
“We’ll warm up slowly.” Mendor was doing the instructing, but Corgan sensed that members of the Supreme Council had been summoned and hovered close by, watching Corgan. Sharla and Brig had not yet appeared.
Though he was still hoarse, Corgan had recovered from the high-decibel shock waves. He no longer felt frightened because he knew exactly what he was supposed to do: follow orders, tell the truth, and win the War honorably.
“Recite the pledge,” Mendor ordered.
Corgan raised his hand, which still trembled very slightly. “I promise to wage the War with courage, dedication, and honor.”
This time he took definite notice of the word “honor”—it slammed his brain with such an impact, he winced.
“Begin.”
The figures of a common board game appeared, three-dimensionally, in front of him.
Chess! Corgan almost smiled. They’d given him chess, an easy game like that. To make amends for his punishment? But when he began to play, the chess pieces turned monstrous. The most horrible images They could throw at him materialized on the chess board, and grew enormous until they towered over him: An octopus slithered over the board and reached for Corgan’s hands with slimy, sucking tentacles; huge, mossy-scaled, misshapen fish gaped toward him with undulating mouths….
“Confront your fears, Corgan,” Mendor urged him.
“What, these? I’m not afraid of these.” Allotting no more than seven-tenths of a second to each chess piece, Corgan demolished them, one by one.
“Play again!” he ordered. “Where’s Brig? I’d like some strategy input from Brig, please. He needs the practice.”
“I’m here, Corgan.” Brig’s image appeared, as ordinary as always, but his eyes looked haunted. “I’ll try to provide useful input,” he said softly.
“See that you do.” Corgan couldn’t stand to look at Brig when he said that. Couldn’t think about Brig’s eyes or about Brig in Reprimand or anything except the practice game. Had to focus all attention on one objective. Play to win.
Swiftly, the two of them dispatched the chessmen to monster hell. Then Sharla appeared, and the team moved on to harder games, playing for an hour without a break. The three of them performed well, their skills blending seamlessly.
“Splendid!” Mendor the Mother said. “Go to your Clean Rooms now. You’ll meet again later for further practice.”
The images of Sharla and Brig vanished instantly, and Mendor said, “Why are you waiting, Corgan? Off to the Clean Room with you, like a good boy, and when you come back, you can choose a nice scene of galaxies to go with your dinner. Stars and planets and comets—”
“No, thank you.” He’d already seen real stars. Virtual galaxies could mean nothing to him from now on. “I’d like the Isles of Hiva again, please,” he said. First, though, he had to deal with a nagging puzzle. “Mendor, I timed you once. It takes you fourteen and thirty-three hundredths seconds to morph from Mother to Father. Or from Father to Mother. Has that changed? Has it speeded up?”
“What a strange question, Corgan. No, it hasn’t. Why did you ask that?”
“Never mind.” Biting his lip, Corgan moved into the tunnel.
When he returned from the Clean Room, his steak was waiting. Not soybeans in disguise—this was real beef, hot and perfect. So he’d been forgiven completely, and his trespasses were to be forgotten. Be a good boy, do what you’re ordered, always tell the truth, and you’ll get steak. Were Sharla and Brig getting real meat, too?
A faint drumbeat throbbed as the Isles of Hiva surrounded him, the ocean waves rushing toward him, flecked with foam, while sea birds cruised on air currents above his head. But he couldn’t really enjoy it. He was too puzzled about why Mendor had seemed to morph so fast.
He considered the possibilities. Maybe he’d been partly unconscious. He knew that a condition known as unconsciousness existed, where a person’s brain shut down for a certain period of time, although he’d never personally experienced such a thing.
The other possibility was more ominous. What if the sound-shock punishment had damaged his time-splitting ability? But why would Mendor or the Council take a chance of hurting him when the War was so close?
“Mendor,” he asked the Mother Figure, “has anyone else with my kind of time skill ever been sound-shocked before?”
“Why talk about unpleasant things?” Mendor replied. “The incident is over. Finished. It’s best forgotten now.”
“Please, I need you to answer that.”
“All right. If you promise to eat while I talk,” Mendor fussed. “Sound-shock is used as punishment because it’s effective and causes no permanent damage. Admittedly it’s unpleasant while it lasts—”
“It’s a lot more than unpleasant!”
“—but it has been fully documented in hundreds of cases and it’s totally harmless. Eat, now. Your steak must be getting cold.”
The steak tasted flat but he chewed and swallowed to satisfy Mendor. “You didn’t tell me what I asked you, though. Has anyone with my time-splitting power been sound-shocked before?”
“Corgan …” Mendor the Mother’s warm image wrapped around him. “Don’t you understand? There is no one else who can calculate time like you do. There never has been. You’re unique. You’re a mutation, with a skill never before known to humankind.”
“I’m a Mutant?”
“No, a mutation, in the best possible sense of the word. That’s how the human race evolved, you know. How everything evolved. The superior mutations, the exceptional ones, have always thrived and flourished; the weak ones die out. Now finish that last bite, and then, would you like to take a nice little stroll across the beach before it’s time to practice again? You’ll have an extra practice session this evening to make up for the time lost this morning.”
“No. No walk.” It was too much for him to handle. He felt overwhelmed by all that had happened that day, by all that had been done to him, and now, by what Mendor had just told him. Shoving it out of his mind, he said, “I think we should get back to practice right away.”
Mendor beamed. “What a dedicated, industrious boy!”
He was neither of those things. He had an urgent need to check his timing, to make sure it was functioning right, and to see Sharla, to try to contact her with his eyes. Had she understood what he tried to tell her before the blast of sound knocked him senseless?
But for the first hour, he practiced alone: Precision and Sensitivity training again. Lately They’d been doubling—even tripling—his P and S sessions. Using electromagnetic energy to move a twelve-centimeter-square patch of laser light seemed an odd exercise to concentrate on, but Corgan asked no questions.
Later, when the team assembled for practice again, Sharla, Brig, and Corgan glanced furtively at one another. After that Sharla avoided Corgan’s eyes. When they recited the pledge this time, she seemed to be saying the same words he did.
They played hard, doing Triple Multiplex, and Corgan was relieved to realize that his timing ability worked fine. But as he checked the score, he saw that it was a little lower than usual. “Mendor, is that score right? Oh, sorry, Mendor, I should have asked permission before I spoke.”
“Forgiven. I will double-check the score, but you must rest now. Tomorrow will be another day for practice.”
As Corgan settled into the aerogel, time ticked away in discrete hundredth-second intervals inside his head. Perfectly. Yet, during that incident earlier in the day—whether it had been brief or otherwise, he didn’t know—he hadn’t been able to calibrate time. And his score tonight had been a little off. If it was true that he was having a bit of trouble with his timing, why should it affect his playing ability? Calculating time was one kind of skill and playing games with his hands was another entirely different skill, and the first shouldn’t have an impact on the second.
At eleven o’clock he stood up and moved toward the door, knowing it was futile to bother, but doing it just the same.
He couldn’t find the opening. In the dark, he felt all over for a way out, but the exit was gone. He was locked in.
What had he expected? That They’d let those secret meetings in the tunnel keep happening, now that They knew?
He’d ruined everything when he confessed. Now he’d never see the real Sharla again. Never be able to touch her. That, on top of everything else that had come crashing down on him today, crushed him with despair.
He slammed his fists into the soft aerogel.
Eight
The next day Sharla wouldn’t meet his eyes, and Brig wouldn’t stop looking at him. Spooky little Brig, pleading without words. Because no matter how hard Corgan tried, he couldn’t match his usual high score in the War-game practice.
He was only a little off, and no one said anything, but everyone noticed.
That night the door was locked again. In his sleep, Corgan ground his teeth and pounded his aerogel pillow.
The following morning he got up and ran a thousand meters on the virtual racing track in his Box, then lifted weights until his biceps burned. When he took his place at practice, Mendor stated, “Ten days remain until the War. According to the rules agreed upon by the three confederations, this is the day your team will be introduced to the actual format the War will take.”
Corgan tensed as the Box filled with surround-images of hills and dusty ground, pockmarked by shallow depressions. A shell exploded right next to him, sending up a plume of orange flame and smoke and a shower of dirt that fell back on his head. He grabbed his ears—since his high-decibel punishment, he shuddered at every loud noise.
“That’s the way wars were fought seventy years ago,” Mendor explained. “Fortunately for you, the War you’re going to fight won’t be quite as brutal, but it will have all the noise of the old-fashioned wars.”
Corgan frowned. That didn’t sound good.
“You will not see the other two teams,” Mendor went on. “We know nothing about them except that each team consists of three players. Age, gender, area of expertise—none of that is known.” Mendor’s harsh voice softened a little. “Conversely, they know nothing about the three of you, either.
“Now, here are the rules: The images you play with will be of actual soldiers in battle dress. All the moves were programmed to recreate real warfare as it was fought at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Tanks, fighter aircraft, aerial bombardment, and artillery—they’ll all be directed against you. Not to mention poison gas attacks, toxic agents, chemical and bacterial contaminants. Your only defense will be to evade these assaults. You will never go on the offensive. All you are allowed to do is protect your troops by moving them to safe ground.”
Corgan asked, “May I speak, Mendor? If we can’t attack, if all we can do is stay out of the way, how do we win the War?”
“Patience!” Mendor the Stern Father demanded. “I’ll explain the rest of the rules later. For now I want you, Corgan, to move the soldiers around to get used to the feel of them. Brig will observe.”
It was as though they were real people, perfectly three-dimensional, with distinct facial features and skin colors, but each one was no bigger than Corgan’s hand. They milled around aimlessly over the pockmarked ground.
“Pull them together, Corgan. Line them up in platoons,” Brig instructed over the audible connector.
Corgan reached out too quickly and obliterated a dozen troops. Brig gasped. Stricken, Corgan looked up at Mendor.
As though trying not to reproach Corgan in front of everyone, Mendor spoke quietly. “Isn’t it obvious, Corgan, that all your Precision and Sensitivity training has been for this one purpose? You must move your soldiers the way you moved the laser square: by compressing electromagnetic force. Never touch them directly! They have been designed so that your hand will set them in motion when you come to within five hundred microns of each image.”
Sharla spoke then. “I could change the codes to increase the magnetic force field a little,” she suggested. “That way Corgan could move the images from farther away—like, seven hundred microns?”
“No!” Mendor was adamant. “The War rules won’t allow that. Corgan can do this. It’s what he’s been trained for. Try again, Corgan.”
Concentrating so hard that sweat broke out on his forehead, Corgan moved his hands toward the images. Although the soldiers looked real and solid, they were only millions of holographic projections of colored lasers, as delicate as moon-beams. If he pushed just a fraction too hard, his hand went through them and they died.
Now he understood why Mendor and the Council had always fussed so much about his hands. Why he’d had to practice countless hours reaching to within a hair’s breadth of the laser square. Strength, stamina, speed—all of them mattered, but not as much as P and S. In this War, Precision and Sensitivity would be the winning factor.
By the middle of the morning, Corgan had gotten the hang of it, sort of. “Now,” Mendor said, “the object of all this is to move your soldiers onto designated territory: the top of that hill, where the flag is. Of course the other two teams will be trying to do the same: to get their soldiers onto the same hill. The team to reach the hill with the largest number of surviving troops will be declared the winner. It’s as simple as that.”
“That’s it?” Corgan asked.
“That’s it. Your job is to move the soldiers without touching them, using electromagnetic force. Shark’s job is to change the trajectory codes of artillery launched against our troops. At the same time she must jam the codes the other teams use as they try to block barrages aimed at their own troops. It won’t be easy—destruction will rain so thick and fast on all three teams that most of it will be impossible to stop.”
