Kingmaker (13 page)

“The tournament? I don’t know. You tell me.”

“Not the tournament. I mean do you think we can win in Sierra Leone?”

Alexei takes his arm away and looks down at the boy. “What we’re doing in Africa, Dre. It isn’t about winning.”

“Then what’s it about?”

“It’s about the only thing that ever matters in any kind of a struggle,” he says. “It’s about picking a side.”

The rules of MAD are simple: the last mech standing wins. Your shields do not regenerate; you do not respawn; there are no bases where damage can be repaired or fresh new mechs sequestered. If you’re mobile, you’re in the game. If you’re incapacitated, a self-destruct sequence initiates, and when the sub-kiloton, low-yield nuclear warhead inside your mech’s core detonates, your game is decisively and unequivocally over.

In addition to your mech—a heavily armored and extensively weaponized bipedal tank—every player also controls an aerial drone for support. Drones can be reconnaissance or attack priority, or some combination of the two. Designs can include anything from a blended-wing, single-engine, high-altitude stealth composition to a hypersonic scramjet with essentially no wings at all. Possible payloads include high-resolution optical and radar imaging packages; air-to-surface, antiarmor, fire-and-forget missiles; various forms of directed-energy weapons; and cyber attack capabilities which introduce the possibility of disabling or even taking control of your opponents’ assets. About the only weapons missing from MAD are those considered to be of “indiscriminate effect,” meaning those of a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or excessively incendiary nature—not due to any sense of virtual morality, mind you, but because WMDs are far more appropriate for killing humans en masse than attacking and destroying individual machines.

The use of small-diameter, linear-implosion, nuclear fission bombs as self-destruct mechanisms makes the line between victory and defeat distinctly
unambiguous; however, regulations governing the ways in which players engage with the game are wide open. The creators of MAD consider their software to be categorically unhackable. All practical attack vectors have been taken into consideration: The game will not run inside of any known form of emulation; using methods Pearl Knight Studios engineers will not disclose, the core engine can detect code injection and adaptively harden itself against live memory editing; modifying saved game data at the binary level is impossible given that the files are encrypted and their integrity guaranteed by 1,024-bit checksums stored remotely on PKS servers; and because all network traffic is both dynamically obfuscated and heavily point-to-point encrypted, the chances of someone figuring out how to forge the protocol in any manner not entirely theoretical are vanishingly small. Since the game itself has never been hacked, any and all methods of interaction are not just legal, but considered an integral part of actual gameplay and strategy.

All forms of input devices are sanctioned, including those that are programmable. Macros are practically mandatory. Novel and creative combinations of keyboards, pointing devices, gamepads, eye-tracking gear, motion control sensors, multitouch surfaces, gestures, voice input, and even brain-computer interfaces are encouraged. And if you can figure out how to write an AI that runs on a separate piece of hardware, takes input from an array of cameras monitoring all your screens, analyzes and interprets and actually understands what it’s seeing, and ultimately responds to the action by emulating some type of controller through a cable connected to your gaming rig—all faster and more effectively than your carbon-based opponents—then knock yourself out.

Similarly, there are no restrictions on output. Some players position themselves inside 180 degrees of continuous, curved, panoramic screen; some stand in front of multiple wall-sized, ultra-high-definition laser projections; some use autostereoscopic 3D surfaces; and some casually deposit themselves among mounds of cushions or beanbags with nothing but a bifurcated controller in hand and an active visor strapped to his or her face. A few even employ various forms of haptic feedback and olfactive synthesis in order to bring all five senses to bear upon their adversaries. Now that Dre is no longer so insecure about his eye—now that the children he spends time with are actually envious of his disability rather than deriding him for it—he has even wondered how he might one day use a
prosthetic with an integrated video signal processor or graphics processing unit to his advantage.

Given the myriad of technologies one can use to interact with MAD, Dre’s training was not just about him learning the mechanics of the game, or about experimenting with and honing various strategies, but in no small part involved him discovering and devising both an input and an output configuration that he was comfortable with, and that he could use to maximize his effectiveness. Boxes of peripherals were waiting for him on the shelves outside the room they call “the theater,” and the boy experimented with hundreds of combinations before finally settling on a relatively straightforward and deceptively simplistic configuration.

He is now sitting cross-legged directly on the foam-core floor in the far corner of the theater like a child being disciplined. All four walls of the room are tiled with seamlessly integrated quad-color photoelectric acoustic panels, but the boy makes use of only a few. The perspective directly ahead of him is that of his mech, and on the wall to his left, he keeps the aerial view from his drone. He has built a small table out of empty cardboard boxes and a dislodged shelf beneath which he is tucked.

His hands rest atop the padded palm rests of twin control pads. Alexei had purchased both a left- and a right-handed model since he didn’t know which hand Dre might favor, but the boy has adapted to using both simultaneously. Beneath his thumbs are textured trackballs whose sensitivity can be dynamically adjusted through downward pressure: the further the trackballs are depressed, the higher the resolution of movement, resulting in a linear increase in precision. Each trackball also uses dynamic electromagnetic force feedback to keep the boy from attempting to maneuver faster than the machines he is controlling can respond.

At the boy’s fingertips are reduced and tapered keypads of twenty-two obnoxiously loud mechanical-switch keys. Both control pads are programmed identically so the boy can use either hand to execute macros, and even to execute multiple macros simultaneously. The small screens above the keypads contain the macro references the boy relied on while training. However, both are currently dimmed; if muscle memory fails him now, he will be dead long before he can bend down and consult a cheat sheet.

Alexei is standing behind the boy, watching over his shoulder and doing his very best not to pace.

“So what kind of strategy do you have in mind?” he asks with forced composure.

Dre is staring at the screen ahead of him, waiting for the game to begin. “You’ll see.”

“Are you going to try what you did last night? That seemed effective.”

“Probably not.”

Alexei nods even though the boy can’t see him. He gets a few steps into a pace, but stops himself. “Do you even know what you’re going to do yet, or are you just going to improvise?”

“Both.”

“Are you going to use any strategies I’ve seen before?”

“I doubt it,” Dre says, “since I’ve never seen them before myself.”

Alexei squints at the boy. “You’re telling me that you’re planning on using a strategy in the final round of the tournament that you’ve never even play-tested before?”

“If I’d tried it before,” Dre says, “it wouldn’t be much of a surprise, would it?” He turns and looks up at Alexei. “Look, man, if I use a strategy that you’ve seen before, that means they’ve seen it before. And if they’ve seen it before, that means they probably know how to counter it. These people have been playing this game for years. I’ve only been playing a few months. My only chance is to do something totally unexpected.” He starts to turn back to his screens, but stops. “
If
that’s OK with you.”

Alexei puts up his hands. “I was just asking.”

“Well do me a favor and don’t,” the boy says. “I got enough to worry about without you standing back there interrogating me. Now can you stay quiet and let me concentrate, or do I have to send you to your office to watch?”

“I’ll be quiet,” Alexei says. “I’ll be quiet.”

The boy’s screens come up simultaneously, each displaying a different perspective on a moderately dense city. A caption fades in at the bottom: “Downtown Washington, D.C.” The entire area has been recreated block by block, building by building, brick by brick—one could even argue atom by atom. Surfaces aren’t just texture maps, but rather are composed of molecularly accurate simulations of actual materials. Absolutely everything is interactive: destroy enough of a building’s foundation, and it will crumble; fire a high-velocity tungsten carbide round at an enemy through a brick wall, and its shape, integrity, composition, trajectory, velocity—and
hence its ultimate effectiveness—will all be appropriately and precisely adjusted; ignite a car with a flamethrower, and the quality of the smoke will be a meticulous amalgamation of gasoline, oil, rubber, and anything else proving combustible at whatever sustained temperature is applied. The maps in MAD represent some of the most detailed and precise environments ever modeled by the extremely low-level and highly parallelized interfusion of hardware and software. MAD defines the bleeding edge. Just about everything else—engines and models and simulations designed by PhD candidates and materials engineers and astrophysicists lured away from academia and into the far more profitable domain of financial services—it’s all just child’s play by comparison. Video games is where the real money is.

The mech Andre has chosen is known as the Mako. At roughly two and a half meters tall, it is one of the smallest in the game, but that means it is also one of the quickest. Rather than the approximate human form of many of the machines (which, according to video game, manga, and anime mythology, evolved out of powered mechanical armor), the Mako looks more like a decidedly inelegant headless ostrich—inelegant, that is, until it is seen in action. Its knees bend in the direction we consider to be backwards, supporting a body comprised primarily of twin two-by-two autoloading missile batteries, two independently targetable, liquid-cooled, six-barrel rotary machine guns, and a single Barrett M111 .50-caliber, semiautomatic, antimateriel rifle. A clump of antenna whips stand in for the long slender neck.

Very few gamers would consider using such a small mech at this level of a professional tournament, which means Dre’s opponents will have developed fewer techniques for confronting and containing him. What the Mako lacks in size, weight, and firepower, it more than makes up for in speed and agility. It can easily reach seventy kilometers per hour, and it’s small enough to make maximum use of its environment. Not only can it compress itself to where it can take cover behind common obstacles like cars and low walls, but it can fit through most doorways, ascend stairwells, and even operate most elevators. The upshot is that it is one of the only mechs that can position itself in urban environments for effective sniping. (Several other models contain short-duration propulsion systems that can get them up to relatively low rooftops, but not without the heat signatures of their solid rocket boosters tipping off every drone in the sky.)

After the players are shown a brief aerial flyby of the city, mechs start spawning. Dre’s appears in the Mt. Pleasant area, close to the National Zoo. The rendering detail is exquisite, and the first thing they hear is the distant screeching of monkeys.

“Too bad we didn’t get West B-more,” Dre says.

“West Baltimore might be too dangerous even for mechs,” Alexei says.

“Very funny.”

The drone Dre has chosen is the Chinese-built Dark Sword, which is designed for both speed and stealth, and is equipped with a sensible combination of optics and ordnance. He looks at his aerial view, which has already started marking ammunition depots and monitoring both movement and heat signatures in an attempt to identify and pinpoint his adversaries.

The boy immediately begins moving south at top speed through Adams Morgan, then veers east at Dupont Circle. There are plenty of cars and trucks scattered throughout the streets but none of them are moving. The MAD core engine is capable of modeling several types of civilian scenarios from crowds of panicked tourists, to civil uprising, to post-apocalyptic desolation. In this scenario, it appears the city has been evacuated, which means collateral damage will not be a consideration.

“Aren’t you going to attract a lot of attention moving that fast?” Alexei asks cautiously.

The boy is pounding down Massachusetts Avenue and around Mt. Vernon Square at close to top speed. “That’s kind of the point,” he tells Alexei.

The Mako continues almost to the eastern edge of the city before turning south again and crossing Pennsylvania Avenue. As it moves, there is the occasional flicker of tracer fire and the whine of passing machine gun rounds, but nothing connects. Alexei sees that Dre has essentially bisected the heart of the city, skirted its perimeter, and is now spiraling in toward the Washington Monument. Three enemy mechs have revealed themselves on his aerial view and are doing their best to track him, but in the process they have also been brought into range of one another’s fire. It starts off with the hum of depleted uranium being spit through the spinning barrels of miniguns, and quickly escalates into the concussion of massive detonations. None of this is on Dre’s screen, however, since his
mech is facing the base of the Washington Monument, where it lifts a well-articulated clawed foot and kicks through the glass entrance, then retracts its missile batteries and ducks through the jagged opening. It is dark inside, but the machine’s floodlights are enough for the boy to find the spiral staircase leading up to the tallest point in the city. By the twelfth landing, the passage has gotten almost too narrow to pass through and the surface area of the steps has diminished enough that even with the dynamic terrain adaptation system built into the mech’s hydraulic-jointed treads, the machine is not as steady as Andre would like. He begins scanning the bricks around him until he finds the inscription.