Firebreak Read online

  “Well,” Jessa said slowly, thoughtfully, like she was actually lending credence to this fairy tale, “the game’s whole thing is that it’s hyperrealistic, right? That’s why it’s so popular. Like you’re right there on the front lines with the real 28 or 33 or whoever and not some random cartoon who’s dressed like them.”

  I knew she was playing devil’s advocate, that she didn’t believe this conspiracy theory stuff any more than I did. Still, though.

  “Historically it’s always been easier to fight wars that people support,” B said. “What Stellaxis did is genius. The SecOps operatives put a face on it. Twelve faces. With trading-card stats and action figures and t-shirts and fame. You can root for them in a way you won’t root for a mech or a smart bomb or a grenade. You care about them.” She searched our faces, and I looked away. “Caring about them keeps you caring about the war, at least abstractly. You don’t want them to get hurt. The irony is that it’s Stellaxis who hurts them. Keeps them imprisoned. Uses them up. Every minute of every day.” She raised her coffee spoon toward Jessa, then toward me. “But that’s not the part you see. You see the part that keeps you taking an interest.” She snorted. “The part that keeps you busy looking at it. So you don’t pay too much attention to what’s really being done to them and to the rest of us.”

  I thought of yesterday’s wiped thousand, six hours out the window, and I cringed.

  “I mean. You’ve seen the war approval ratings. Twentieth-century wars, twenty-first-century wars? Nowhere near this popular. Read up on some history sometime. It’s fascinating. Hearts and minds, you know?”

  I didn’t know. It sounded like a quote from somewhere. But I didn’t want to look stupid in front of our new sponsor, so I just shrugged and made a third pass for missed cookie crumbs on my plate. There weren’t any.

  “Besides,” B went on, more lightly now, “you’re assuming that an all-powerful megacorporation is remotely likely to be bothered by anything I can do, no matter what I know or don’t know. But there are others out there like me. Other people who knew the operatives when they were young. If we combine information, work together…” B trailed off, blew out an exasperated breath. “I don’t know. Maybe it won’t turn up anything. Maybe none of them will match up. Maybe it’s a dead end. But I’ve spent years just sitting on this knowledge, keeping my head down, trying not to draw attention, scared of what would happen to me and my family if I did.”

  Jessa furrowed her brow. “What changed your mind?”

  For a second B looked like she was actually going to laugh. Then I realized that whatever her face was doing, it was closer to a snarl. “They’re dying. All of them.”

  Beside me, Jessa was nodding. 06, 08, 22. The only ones left.

  “I can’t sit on this anymore. I have to do something. Elena’s gone. Most of the others, gone. I’m running out of time. If we expose the company’s lies, they’ll have to shut down the program. Let those last three go. Maybe one of them is on this list. Maybe one of them has somebody out there somewhere. Someone who knew them well enough when they were little to recognize them in something we find now.”

  “A fucking babysitter,” I suggested, earning me a little coffee-cup salute from B.

  “Hey,” she said. “If I suddenly disappear, at least we’ll know I was right.”

  * * *

  BY THE TIME we get home, everyone except Allie’s back from work, so the room is packed. There’s a bit over three hours left before power curfew, which means everyone’s busy catching up on all the various self-care and housekeeping tasks that require electricity before putting on their blackout masks and settling in to run out the clock before the curfew drops them.

  We walk in to well-ordered chaos, if such a thing exists. People are weaving in and out of each other’s way with the grace that comes of long-term cohabitation. Keisha and Tegan are taking turns microwaving their company-store noodles and tea water. Jackson is putting grounds into the coffee machine with one hand, swiping water over from his account with the other. Talya and Suresh decide they want in on coffee, so Jackson adds more grounds while they swipe their water over. Then they go back to the fold-down table where they’ve been assembling their peanut butter sandwiches.

  There’s laundry strung up across the closet door, barely damp and smelling of badly rinsed hand soap, and a huge tangle of devices and accessories piled around the charging station with a whiteboard indicating who still has how much time left on which slot. Ryan unplugs his self-warming coffee cup, checks the whiteboard, and plugs Keisha’s headlamp into the vacated slot. The bathroom’s empty, so Jessa and I duck in there to put our lenses back in before someone asks us why we’re offline.

  “Last call for coffee,” Jackson calls over when he sees us emerge. Checks the volume of water allotted to the coffeepot against its potential capacity. “Got eight cups left.”

  “Fill it up,” Jessa shouts back. “Mal and I got a new sponsor. Coffee’s on us today.” She works her way over and swipes water to the pot amid cheers.

  When it’s done and divided among everyone except the tea drinkers (with a cup left for Allie when she gets back tonight from the drug trial she’s working), Jessa and I put together some half-assed dinner for ourselves and climb up to our bunks one-handed with sandwiches balanced on top of our coffee cups. Some of the others have already settled in, blackout masks in place. Not sure who’s playing today and who’s just messing around online. Not that Jessa and I tend to run into any of them often anyway. It’s a big game.

  I load the game, and the login pops up, overlaid on my field of vision. A few seconds pass while my lens-implant interface verifies that I’m me. Then the login screen vanishes, replaced by the stars-and-arrow Stellaxis logo, which fades out through the BestLife title screen and on to the game lobby. I select Nycorix, put on the new cape and helmet, and pull on the blackout mask to double-check my newly earned stash of ammo and heal patches while I work my way through my sandwich and coffee.

  Two hours forty-eight minutes before power curfew. No way am I getting anywhere near today’s thousand. But of course, I remind myself with a stupid little pang, that’s not what we’re here for. Not anymore.

  Jessa’s team request is there, blinking, and I hit accept. In the corner, she’s already messaging away.

  so. about today. do we really believe all that stuff about the you-know-whos being you-know-what instead of. um There’s a moment while she tries to gauge what she does and doesn’t want to risk being recorded and kept by the game, then settles on: instead of the other thing

  Easy enough to translate, not that I really have an honest answer. Do we really believe that Stellaxis’s operatives were kidnapped instead of made? I don’t know. I’m not even entirely sure it matters. Five gallons a week is a lot of water, and B’s photo could have been of anyone. The real 05’s been dead for, what, almost six years now? All we have to go on is old news footage and internet videos and poster close-ups. Sometimes one of them will get hauled out of Stellaxis HQ to do some kind of photo-op or product sponsorship, and sometimes there’ll be a commercial in which 11 drinks a soda or 38 models some smart mascara or 06 talks about how, despite her best efforts, the war zone is a dangerous place and we should really think about optimizing our health coverage. There was one a few years back where they had 22 pushing some kind of frozen dinner thing, presumably under duress, and while on the one hand it made me want to murder people, on the other hand I watched that piece of fuckery more times than I care to admit.

  For all we know, the 22 in the commercial, or the 06 or the 11 or whoever, might not be them them at all. They can practically clone the operatives down to the mannerism for the game, why not for TV?

  What I’m getting at is that, while the operatives’ faces are plastered pretty much everywhere, that’s as far behind the curtain as we get to see. We don’t know enough about them to have handholds on the question: no, they can’t be lab-grown AI. Only a real human could have done such-and-such. We don’t ev
er see them doing any of those favorite pastimes or eating any of those favorite foods listed in such loving detail in the wikis. They do that stuff in the game, sure, but is that the same thing? I don’t know. It’s not like they’re in the habit of turning the cameras on the operatives for interviews. The whole defense division of Stellaxis Innovations has been classified forever. The mystique is part of the SecOps allure.

  Still, all the no-lenses, meet-in-my-sister’s-coffee-shop, never-need-to-see-each-other-again secrecy has me on edge. I mean, B’s whole if-I-disappear thing feels melodramatic. Along the lines of those fan theories that pop up regularly, the ones where people are convinced there’s some higher purpose to the game. Top players will be recruited and trained by that same corporate defense division to fight for real in the real war in the real city—that’s a popular one. Or that they get taken to live in fancy suites in the Stellaxis building, where they drive the real-life operatives remotely, bonded to them in some kind of prototype bleeding-edge fully immersive interface. You get the idea.

  Point is, if Stellaxis locked up or murdered everyone who had a pet conspiracy theory to air out, our hotel room would be a whole lot less crowded. More likely, if we somehow managed to annoy someone in power, they’d slap us with a terrorism charge and an interface lockout, and we’d be as good as disappeared.

  dunno, I reply carefully. but we listen to the requests of generous sponsors. that’s kind of our whole job. let’s get in there and earn our pay

  I hope she takes this as it’s meant, namely: shut up before you say something that gets us put on a list, and we’ll talk later if we can find someplace that’s not listening.

  There’s an ominous pause. Before Jessa can open her virtual mouth and bury us both, I turn Nycorix around on her booted heel and walk her through the door at the back of the lobby and into the game. Jessa’s teamed with me, which gives her a ten-second window to get her shit together and follow.

  The door leads, as it always does, to wherever we were when we left the game. Last night’s power curfew dropped us without a proper logout, which means our characters lingered around for the minute or so it takes for them to time out after a connection goes dead. Usually this is something you’d try to avoid in a hostile area like this. Especially a hostile area that isn’t patrolled often enough by other players to keep it cleaned out of fresh enemy spawns. We could be logging back in to the middle of a world of trouble, surrounded and unprepared. I’ve already got the heal syringe free of my back pocket, already cleared and reloaded the blaster, on my way through the door.

  But it seems fine. Dead empty, in fact. All except a lone spidermech in the distance among those warehouses, stuttering in place like it’s stuck in the scenery.

  When I got here last night, this playfield was swarming. I made my almost thousand in the absolute horde of enemies that had spawned here. Today? Nothing.

  Immediately it’s clear why.

  Jessa’s got QueenOfTheRaids coming through the door behind me, double-fisting her plasma guns, already gluing her back to Nycorix’s like we’re going to have to mow ourselves a clear perimeter and then inch our way out of here shot by shot. Probably would look good on the stream anyway, for the twenty seconds it’d take us to die.

  She takes in the scene and wilts visibly. So much for looking good on the stream. “Where the hell’re all the—oh.”

  The answer to her question is: dead. There are at least a dozen teams out here canvassing the airstrip, blasting anything in their path. “At least it’s not a PvP zone,” I mutter.

  “Why so annoyed? This is, like, the literal opposite of what we were afraid of happening when we got back in here.”

  “Yeah, no, it’s great.” I shade my eyes against the sun. What are they all doing here?

  Why am I annoyed? No good reason. There’d be no chance of making a thousand today anyway, sea of mobs or no sea of mobs. And even if I did, that’s on the back burner now. Water is the thing. Reliable, easy, no-strings-attached, enough-to-live-on-if-I’m-careful water.

  “What’s that?” Jessa is saying to someone unseen. “Oh. Oh. That makes a lot of sense, guys, thanks for the heads-up!”

  Even as she’s saying this, a new message lights up in the corner of my view. you didn’t get any of that did you

  I pretend I don’t see it. Dawning on me is a pretty solid guess as to what these other teams are doing out here. If I’m wrong, the timing would be highly coincidental at best.

  will you pretty please. take. the stream. off mute

  Fine.

  I blink at the icon to unmute it and am hit with the exact wall of noise I was hoping to avoid.

  “—out here all morning waiting to see if she pops back up again—”

  “—seen her in months, she’s like some kind of fucking ninja or something, she just straight up disappears—”

  “—doing when you found her anyway?”

  “Nyx found her,” Jessa tells them, and turns her gaze on me like a magnifying glass with the sun behind it. Engage, she mouths.

  “She, uh.” I clear my throat. I hate this part of the job, I truly do. It’s public speaking and performing in front of an audience and hanging your entire livelihood on the approval of strangers all rolled into one tidy panic-attack-inducing bundle. “She was over there.” I raise one hand vaguely toward the warehouses. “Walking around.”

  “Coordinates?” someone asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Distance?”

  “However far those buildings are.”

  “What about before QueenOfTheRaids started the stream?”

  “Same thing. I caught her beacon in the distance. Literally just wandering the airstrip and off into that field over there.”

  At least one of our viewers is obviously following one of those other teams as well and relaying info, because within two seconds of my saying this, over by the warehouses one guy whips around toward the field and signals his team to follow. I never said she’s still there, I want to yell after him.

  Understandable, though, really. Jessa checked the forum this morning, and it turns out nobody’s logged a 28 sighting in the past two and a half weeks. Someone in the top spot apparently nabbed her a few days ago, but it’s not the same. It’s when you catch sight of them in the wild, as it were, that they’re said to act like the purest analogues of their real-life selves. I don’t know who actually has any basis for comparison to verify this, but it’s internet gospel, and so this place is slammed. Especially for a dead one, like 28, or a hyperpopular one, like 06, any intel you can get your grubby little stream on is gold.

  Speaking of. I check the time. Two hours thirty-nine minutes.

  “How’s the bike?” I ask Jessa pointedly, and she breaks off whatever chat she was having with whoever and takes the bike out of inventory for inspection. It shimmers into existence beside her. She powers it on, and nothing. The power cell spins up and drops back juddering.

  General background chorus of advice and sympathy from our viewers. Mostly advice.

  “I’m walking,” I tell Jessa.

  Walking where? is a question that neither of us really has an answer for. There were dozens of kids on B’s list, none of them at a glance any more or less liable to have grown up into supersoldiers than the others. As for the SecOps NPCs, where they are now is anyone’s guess. According to the boards, someone’s using 21 at the moment, but the rest of them are out there somewhere, wandering, reading comics like 28, or eating donuts like 17. It’s just a question of finding them. Which is easier said than done.

  “Hold up a sec,” Jessa shouts over a shoulder at me. I turn. She’s pried the power cell out of its casing and is shaking it hard between both hands. “Read about this—trick—in the—forum. Here we go.” She pops the cell back into its casing and powers up the hoverbike. The connection flares up, fizzles wetly, and dies. “Hmm.”

  “Worked better in the forum?”

  “You know, it did.”

  More advice c
oming in, getting louder as people disagree and advance countertheories and generally make an outrageous mess of noise all over our stream.

  Two hours thirty-four minutes.

  I can barely hear myself think over this. I message her directly.

  we have to get moving

  i know i know. watch my six i’m gonna try some—

  She freezes as something else yanks her attention away. Maybe some of these advice givers have taken to direct messaging. She lets way, way too many random people into her personal space. There’s a reason why none of them are hassling me, and that’s because they’re not any of the dozen roommates and employers in my filter.

  Dutifully, I watch Jessa’s six. There’s not much there to watch. The airstrip is deader than it was when I left it last night. Periodically a gunner or mech or whatever will pop and get obliterated in the crossfire of at least three canvassing teams, but no major spawn appears. They must have done a sweep here real recently, and it takes some mental rearranging to perceive that as a good thing. Let it go, I tell myself. Start early tomorrow.

  Sudden shadow overhead. I glance up. A breakaway nanodrone is hovering above me, freshly spawned, just outside aggro range. I take aim and blast it out of the sky before it notices me there. My daily thousand counter skips up from zero to one. The resulting happy little sound effect adds insult to injury.

  I loot the downed drone real quick while Jessa does whatever. Nanodrones take a handful of seconds to decay, but the flip side of that is the loot is good. This one has almost a dollar’s worth of credit and a half dozen bio-freighted fléchettes, which I can sell to someone tradeskilling dirty bombs. I drop the fléchettes in my inventory, dump the credit in my account, and turn my attention back to Jessa.