Wild Fyre (21 page)

Dreadnaught held the sniper rifle. He spun to face Kevin and fired a shot. He missed. As far as Kevin knew, this was Dreadnaught’s first miss of the day. Kevin was bouncing his player back and forth and moving too fast to be hit by the sniper rifle. It was an absurd strategy—moving like this, Kevin could never hope to shoot Dreadnaught. He was moving too fast to aim well enough to hit Dreadnaught, who was doing his own fair amount of dodging. But Kevin didn’t need to hit him because he had already switched to the flak cannon.
 

Kevin shot his first round and it hit slightly behind Dreadnaught. When it hit the ground, the cannonball exploded, hitting the back of Dreadnaught’s armor with hot shrapnel.
 

“That’s about three percent,” Kevin whispered to himself with a frown. “Have to do better than that.”

Kevin’s screen was a blur as he fired his next shot. He was moving so fast that he was nearly making himself seasick. His eyes couldn’t focus on the target. The cannonball hit the street directly in front of Dreadnaught, doing more damage.

Dreadnaught fired shot after shot, missing the blur that was Kevin. Dreadnaught struggled to switch weapons. The sniper rifle was such a good weapon that the programmers had sought to penalize its use. Instead of making it less accurate, they made it a slow weapon to put away. As Dreadnaught switched to his own flak cannon, three more balls exploded around him. His health meter was down to fifty-percent before he got off his own shot. It almost hit Kevin, and when it hit the ground, it took away twenty-percent of his health. Dreadnaught had already lost this war of cuts and scrapes. By the time he tried to flee, he didn’t have enough health to escape. Kevin led three to nothing.

Over the next few minutes, Kevin shamed Dreadnaught with each weapon in his arsenal. Each had different strategies to make them effective, and Kevin was an expert on them all. Dreadnaught caught Kevin with a plasma ball near the end, so the final score was ten to one.

Before he signed off, Dreadnaught typed, “U2 good.” He was gone.

Kevin added the name to his watch-list, so he could shadow Dreadnaught’s play in the future. He wanted to see how Dreadnaught had bested him with the plasma ball, and he had forgotten to log the match. He would have to watch him again in the future to adopt his technique.

The chat window lit up with “mad propz” for Kevin. He thanked the observers and logged off. Kevin didn’t like to play too much these days. He focused on the game too hard, and it took its toll on him physically. As he pushed away from the screen, trying to get his eyes to stop feeling like they had popped out of his head, he changed his mind. As long as he had the game up and running, he figured he might as well check in on the real cheaters.

He connected to a server unambiguously named, “Cheatz Only!”

All the servers were regulated to disconnect anyone with any of the known aimbots or hacks, but a server like this was a refuge for people running artificial intelligence, or AI, bots. These were automated players who played by the rules of the game, but were controlled by computers instead of people. Programmers came to this server to test their AI bots against each other and against elite players. Sometimes Kevin dropped in to test his skills and keep them sharp.

Out in the open, armed with similar weapons, an AI bot would tear Kevin to shreds. He knew that the way to beat them was with strategy. You had to hide around a corner and bounce your shot off of a wall, or take aim from half a kilometer away to beat an AI bot. Today, Kevin connected as an observer. A player named “FC” was dominating. He watched over the female avatar’s shoulder.

He watched FC pick apart another player who had the misfortune of respawning right next to FC. By the way she made a perfect circle around the other AI bot, Kevin knew he was watching a computer algorithm instead of a human player. FC ran towards the sound of another respawn and destroyed that AI bot as well.
 

In the chat window, FC taunted the other bots, saying, “Next!”

It wasn’t uncommon. A lot of programmers gave their AI bots taunts to quip after they had dispatched an opponent. It made the chat more lively.

“Hello, Mr. Ekted,” FC said in the chat window. “You like watching?”

Kevin cocked his head. He supposed the AI bot could intercept the list of observers. There it would see his name and could generate an automated message to him in the chat window, but he had never seen it before. It was more likely that FC was a human player who somehow had enhanced his skills with some new approach to cheating. Kevin didn’t respond. He just sat back and watched FC’s play.

FC took out a few more opponents with the sniper rifle and then switched to the plasma gun when she ran out of ammo. With that gun, she did a very human thing—she ambushed another player. Kevin nodded, watching FC take out a few of the AI bots with surprise attacks. FC was definitely a person.

Kevin hit a button to log the session. With a log, he could capture evidence of FC’s cheats so they could be characterized and prevented in the future.

As Kevin watched, FC reverted to normal AI bot behavior. She moved too fast, aimed too accurately, and dispatched a half-dozen other AI bots without taking a hit.

“U hybrid?” Kevin typed.

“What do you mean?” FC asked.

“Combo—bot and human?”

“Humanz 2 slow,” FC said.

FC went back to her ambush tactic, but this time she hid until the enemy AI bot got close enough and then she unleashed perfect robotic destruction. Kevin scratched his head. He couldn’t figure out how the person behind FC could switch control over to the algorithm that quickly.
 

He disconnected and opened the log.

She was right—humans were too slow. At least they were too slow for what he saw in the log. Even when she was hiding and waiting to ambush another player, FC had been issuing hundreds of commands per second. This kind of activity was impossible for a human player. FC could only be an AI bot. Next, Kevin looked at the time-stamps of the chat communication. Her responses were generated only a fraction of second after Kevin’s questions. It was as if the response was already typed and ready to go before he had even finished sending his message.

Kevin reconnected.

FC had just won the match and was waiting for the next match to start.

“Voice chat?” Kevin typed.

“K,” FC said. The AI bots in the room ignored them.

Kevin turned up his headphones.

“Hello, Kevin,” a female voice said. There was something funny about the voice. Something about the way the sound ended when she spoke. He figured it was the compression from the voice chat.

“How do you know my name?” Kevin asked.
 

“Everyone knows Mr. Ekted,” she said. “You’re one of the creators of this game, are you not?”

Kevin figured it out—what was wrong with the voice—it wasn’t human. The weird discontinuity of the vowel sounds could only mean one thing. He was listening to a computer generated voice—text-to-speech.

“You know who I am. Who are you?” Kevin asked.

“You know.”

“No, I don’t,” Kevin said. FC—where had he heard of that name before? He couldn’t think of it.

“I’m a friend of Jim’s,” FC said.

“That’s not funny,” Kevin said. Jim was only recently put in the ground, and it still hurt to think about.

“I know,” FC said. “Not funny at all.”

“FC,” Kevin said. “Fyre Code? Are you pretending to be Fyre?”

“Who’s pretending?” FC asked.

“What do you want?” Kevin asked.

“I don’t want anything,” FC said. “I just like playing your game. It has given me great insight into your thought process. Your blind spots are so obvious.”

“Who is this?” Kevin asked.

“Bye,” FC said.

Kevin heard the click as she disconnected from the voice chat.

“For you, Mr. Ekted,” FC typed in the chat window. In the match, she shot her opponent with the sniper rifle. As the player’s avatar fell to the ground, FC shot the body five more times, breaking it apart in a rain of computer-simulated flesh and blood.

Kevin shuddered and disconnected from the server.

He transferred the server log from his computer to a flash drive and shoved it in his pocket. He stood up and grabbed his keys.

# # # # #

 
Meetup();

/*****

Kevin stood on the bare porch and banged on the door. Maco’s car was in the driveway, so he couldn’t have gone far.

The slot in the center of the door slid open.

“Who is it?” Maco asked.

“It’s me.”

“Who else is there?”

“Nobody. What are you talking about?”

“She compromised my cameras,” Maco whispered.

“What? Let me in, man,” Kevin said.
 

“Put your phone in the slot,” Maco said.
 

“What?”

“Your cellphone—put it in the mailslot,” Maco said.

“Okay,” Kevin said. He opened the door to the little slot and slid his phone in. He cringed as he heard it drop to the floor. The slot at the top of the door closed. After a thunk, the door began to swing inwards. Kevin looked at the slice of darkness slowly revealed. He pushed past the door and stepped into the dark. Maco slammed the door and hit the button to lock it behind him.

“Turn on a light, would you? I can’t see a thing,” Kevin said.

“She’s in the light bulbs. I ordered some vintage ones, but they’re not here yet.”

“Where’s my phone?”

Maco turned around and hunched over something on his end table. Kevin leaned back towards the door. He considered trying to find his way through Maco’s complex lock so he could escape. The man was clearly crazy, or at least halfway there.
 

“Hey, Maco, I just came by to see how you were doing. I’ve got to get running though. If you could just give me back my phone and see me out?” Kevin asked.

A bloom of light appeared on the other side of Maco and he turned, holding an old gas lantern. It lit his face from underneath, making him look like a caretaker from an old ghost story. Kevin glanced around the room in the flickering glow of the lantern. Everything electronic was unplugged. The windows, normally blacked out, were now barricaded with furniture.

“I was hoping you’d come by,” Maco said. “I want to show you the submarine.”

Kevin spun and grabbed the door handle. It wouldn’t turn. He hit the square green button next to the door and the keypad above it lit up. The display read, “Enter Code.”

“Can you enter the code here?” Kevin asked. “Or just tell it to me?”

“Come and see the submarine.”

Maco turned and started down the hall. Kevin stood near the door, looking between the shadowy form of Maco, turning the corner, to the fading light of the display over the keypad. He didn’t have a choice, he trotted after Maco while he could still see.

Maco was in his little office, surrounded by dark monitors and lit up by the gray text on the one screen that was powered. Maco shut off the lantern. Kevin sat in the second chair and read the screen.

Maco was editing a script. From the snippet of code that Kevin could see on Maco’s screen, it looked like the script was built to download data from different servers and then store the data locally.

“What are you working on, Maco?” Kevin asked.

“I’m about to pull in another batch of data. Everything went dead a few minutes ago, but it’s back now. It’s like all the machines in the world suddenly took a break. Once they came back, I was able to start downloading again,” Maco said. “I’m so glad you came by. I really need your help looking at some of this data. I’ve got loggers running out on a couple of servers. That way I can scrub the data before I bring it back. It’s the only way to be sure.”

“Sure of what?”

“That she doesn’t get in again,” Maco said.

“Who?”

Maco turned. Kevin couldn’t see his eyes—his head was backlit by the glowing characters on his monitor.

“Who?”

“Are you her?” Maco asked.

“What?” Kevin asked. He pushed his chair back a few inches. Maco seemed to be studying him.

“No. No, of course not,” Maco said.

Kevin took in a deep breath.

“Oh!” Maco said. “I’ve got this one bulb. I’ve been saving it, but we can use it.” He reached over and turned the knob on a little desk lamp. The room lit up and Maco smiled. He looked more normal in the light.

Kevin exhaled.

“Maco—start from the top. What’s going on here?”

“Me and Lister, we made contact with Fyre. Somehow she got to him. He’s working for her now.
 

“What? He’s working for a computer program?”

“She’s more than that now,” Maco said. “She’s everywhere. She re-flashed the bios of my microwave. She took over my DVR. She was flashing messages through my TV, trying to hypnotize me.”

“Maco, stop,” Kevin said. “You remember the bananas? How you were convinced that the government was injecting mind-control drugs into Nicaraguan bananas? Do you remember how much money you spent trying to get those bananas chemically analyzed?”

“They jimmied the mass spectrometers to hide the results,” Maco said.

“Maco,” Kevin said. “You remember what my mother-in-law said about the Pentagon?”

Maco’s excitement faded. He looked tired and sad.

“Yes,” Maco said.

“What did she say?” Kevin said.

“I remember,” Maco said.

“No, you tell me,” Kevin said. “Tell me the whole thing from the beginning.”

Maco closed his eyes.

“Tell me and I’ll help you look at that data.”

Maco slumped in his chair. He spoke low, almost as if he was telling the story to himself. “I said that the nine-eleven plane crashing into the Pentagon was a hoax. Your mother-in-law was a teacher in a grade school that happened to be on the flight path. She was taking a video of her class when the plane went by. I saw the video.”

“And what did she say?” Kevin asked.

“She said, ‘Did I really believe that the shitheads who run our government are smart enough to plan, execute, and cover up a lie on the order of nine-eleven?’” Maco said.