Virtual war, p.3
Virtual War, page 3
“Recite the pledge, Corgan,” Mendor instructed.
Corgan raised his hand to say, “I pledge to wage the War with courage, dedication, and honor,” as he did before every practice session. Sharla seemed to be saying the pledge, too, but with her image so out of focus, it was hard to tell whether she was murmuring the same words Corgan spoke. He stared intently at her lips.
“Pay attention, Corgan,” Mendor ordered. “You and Sharla will start out with a few easy exercises to warm up. We’ll change trajectory codes ten times while you play the first game. Sharla will adjust the program each time the code is changed so you won’t miss any hits. You can play Golden Bees to start, since you like that game so much.”
At the end of the Golden Bees session, Corgan asked, “What happened? I thought the trajectory codes were supposed to change.”
Sharla laughed—at least that much of her was the same. Her laugh sounded as full of delight and amusement as when she’d hit him on the head with the Go-ball.
“The codes did get changed,” Mendor said dryly. “You just didn’t notice, because Sharla calibrated and adjusted each one in about a tenth of a second. She’s fast.”
“I really wasn’t trying as hard as I should have,” Shark said apologetically. The mischief in her eyes contradicted her modest tone.
“You must always try to do your best work” Mendor ordered.
They practiced a few more times, and then Mendor told them, “The rules governing the Virtual War were agreed upon, after five years of negotiation, by the Western Hemisphere Federation, the Eurasian Alliance, and the Pan Pacific Coalition. If either one of you breaks a rule unintentionally—even though it’s just through human error—the infraction will be recorded. If you commit three such errors, we lose the War.”
Corgan nodded. He’d heard it all before.
“But if you deliberately break a rule—just once,” Mendor went on, “it’s all over. We lose.”
“How are the judges going to know if it’s intentional or not?” Sharla asked.
Why would she ask that? Corgan wondered. Surely They’d gone over that with her. Dozens of times.
Mendor looked perplexed, but he began to answer Sharla, going off in all directions, like he always did, to talk about every other possible topic that had anything at all to do with what she’d asked. Mendor could never get right down to the core of a question.
Corgan gazed off into the distance while Mendor rambled on. Suddenly a small image of Shark’s blurry face appeared just inches in front of his eyes. “Don’t say anything!” the tiny image warned him. “Just listen. Your Mendor won’t catch on that I’m doing this. I fixed the codes.”
Corgan was about to answer her but something slammed hard against his mouth. “Shut up!” the Sharla image hissed. “Just listen! Tonight at eleven o’clock I’ll alter the codes so you can come out of your Box and They won’t know. Meet me in the tunnel.”
Corgan’s eyes widened. It was a good thing Mendor wasn’t focusing on him right then.
“Okay?” the Sharla image whispered. “If it’s okay, blink real fast right now.”
Corgan blinked.
“We’ll meet person to person,” the tiny face of Sharla told him. “Real. Not virtual.” The image disappeared.
“You should be paying attention to this, too, Corgan,” Mendor said irritably. “Or do you think you already know it?”
“Yes, I already know it,” he answered.
“That kind of overconfidence could lead to serious mistakes,” Mendor said. “Even if you think you know everything, it doesn’t hurt to learn it over again.”
“Sorry, Mendor,” Corgan said. His voice shook a little. Mendor would think the quaver came from shame at being scolded. Let him think that. The real tremor was inside Corgan’s chest, not his throat.
Did Sharla mean it? Could she do what she said—arrange it so they’d actually come face to face, and Corgan would be in the presence of another human being of bone and blood and muscle? He wondered if he’d have the courage to touch her, to take her hand.
What about infection? From the moment of his birth in the laboratory he’d lived inside a Box, away from any possibility of contamination. The Earth’s population was so sparse now—hardly more than two million people left on the whole planet—that none of the three global confederations ever let people be together in the same space. Or have actual physical contact with one another. At least not as far as Corgan knew. Everything, for everyone, had to be virtual—always. Everyone lived in his or her own Box, enveloped in aerogel, nurtured by it, comforted and sustained by it.
Aerogel, the miracle substance. Discovered eons ago, back in the 1930s, but not till a hundred years ago in the 1980s had scientists figured out how to use it. Aerogel, called “frozen smoke.” Light as air, a super insulator that protected against heat or cold but couldn’t be frozen itself and could tolerate temperatures as high as two thousand degrees Celsius. Made from long strands of silicon dioxide—common sand—linked together with pockets of air. Aerogel was 99.6% air.
In a Box lined with aerogel, a person could live his entire virtual life, because aerogel carried electronic signals. Mixed with metal ions, it became a virtual medium that delivered 3-D, wraparound images as well as sounds, smells, touch—everything but taste. That afternoon, as Corgan advanced through a dozen practice levels, his senses were reacting to signals sent through aerogel.
“Very good. That’s enough drill for now,” Mendor stated. “You need some physical exercise.” Immediately Sharla vanished and Corgan’s virtual surroundings changed into a running track—a circular dirt track with white lines marking the edges and sweet-smelling grass growing in the middle. Obediently, he started to run faster and faster around the track, and all the time he was still in his Box, running on a treadmill imbedded in the floor, not a dozen inches from where he’d spent the whole day.
Corgan’s aerogel-filled Box was his whole world, safe, sanitized, and lighted by a virtual sun. It was his cocoon. The surrounding aerogel-coated walls put him, electronically, into any scene created for him. Nothing could harm him in his Box, nothing could disturb him. Except Sharla, who managed to disturb Corgan’s thoughts quite a bit later that night as he squirmed inside his aerogel bed.
Usually Corgan would fall asleep right when he was supposed to. Every night at exactly ten o’clock, Mendor the Mother Figure would call out, “Sleepy time, Corgan!” in a sweet, silly, singsong voice, and Corgan would settle himself into the aerogel, which had been cooled by five degrees for nighttime comfort. Within minutes he’d sink into the light sleep that always preceded his dreams. Dreams of ocean waves, or of the huge dinosaurs and pterodactyls that he’d picked out to decorate the walls of his Box when he was little. Sometimes he’d dream of soaring over trees in a forest of tall ferns and flowering branches. But since the day he’d played Go-ball with Sharla, he’d dreamed of other kinds of trees. Palm trees.
That night, though, Corgan wouldn’t let himself fall asleep. He yawned, loudly, for Mendor’s benefit. “’Night, Mendor,” he said. Then he waited, lying as still as possible, counting the tiny grains of time as they cascaded over the sharp edge of his wakefulness. Since his sleep was always monitored by sensors embedded in the aerogel, he was afraid to move much—if he tossed and turned, as his body urged him to do, They’d check on him to discover what was keeping him awake: did he have a fever; did his hands hurt; did his throat feel sore?
“You’re such a wonderful sleeper!” Corgan had been told over and over again when he was a little boy, as though sleeping were a skill as important as his ability to tell time to the hundredth of a second, or to throw a ball through a hoop thirty meters away, which he’d mastered before he turned three.
It is now twenty-two hours and forty-seven minutes and thirteen and eight-tenths seconds past midnight, he counted in his head. At twenty-two hours, fifty-nine minutes, and forty-five seconds he would stand up and attempt to walk through the door of his Box. What would happen? Could Sharla really fix the code so no one would know, so Mendor the Mother Figure wouldn’t appear the instant Corgan stood up, asking him what was wrong—did he have to go to the Clean Room, had something upset him, did he feel too warm, and on and on and on?
He stood. Nothing, no Mendor. He moved through the pliable aerogel to the door of his Box. It opened. He stepped into the tunnel.
It was dark. Sharla must not have known how to light the passageway. Or else she was afraid to because They would notice light where it wasn’t supposed to be.
“Corgan?” The whisper made a chill rush over his skin.
“Where are you?” he whispered.
“In front of you. Reach out.”
It was going to happen, then. For the first time in his life, Corgan was going to touch a human being. He knew it would be dangerous, because contamination got spread by touch from person to person, which was why 93 percent of the Earth’s human population had ceased to exist in the past eighty years. He’d been taught the danger ever since he could remember knowing anything, and now—he didn’t care.
She touched him first. When her fingers reached his chest he trembled so violently that he almost fell against the wall—only his natural agility let him straighten himself in time.
“It’s all right,” she said softly. “Hasn’t anyone ever touched you before?”
“No. What about you?”
Even muted, her laugh sounded joyful. “Corgan, I was bred to break codes. And on my own, I figured out how to break rules. Practically from the day I could walk They couldn’t control me. I’ve been everywhere. I know everything. All about you, and the world, and the War we’re going to win for Them, and …”
“All about me?”
“Sure. You and I were bred in the same laboratory. I looked up the records to find out about you.”
“What about me?”
The words coming out of him sounded ordinary and rational, even though inside he felt total chaos—in his brain, in the pounding of his heart, in the way his breath kept catching in his lungs. He was standing beside a living human being. Except for that one fleeting brush of her fingers across his chest, they hadn’t touched again. But he could feel her breath on his face when she spoke, still in whispers.
“You’re one of Their greatest successes, Corgan,” she said. “You were genetically engineered to have the fastest reflexes possible in a human. You and I happened to be in the same crop of genetic experiments, and the scientists almost went crazy when we were born. Because both of us turned out even better than they’d expected. We’re not only superior, we’re supreme. And I speak in all modesty….” She laughed softly.
Her nearness made him dizzy. “What about the rest of the crop we were in?” he asked.
“Failures. The rest were all Mutants. Fourteen of them. Twelve died, and two went into the Mutant Pen. Since then, though, the geneticists have gotten better at it.”
“How?” he asked, as softly as possible. If she had to lean forward to hear him, she’d be close enough that he could breathe the scent of her.
“The geneticists studied you and me to figure out what made us so good. It took a lot of years, but they’ve finally got a few more successes like us coming along, except those kids are all a lot younger than we are. Which is why you and I will fight the War.”
The meaning of her words suddenly penetrated. Although still intensely aware of her presence, Corgan began to focus on what she was telling him. All of it was new to him. “Why didn’t They teach me this?” he asked, forgetting to whisper.
“NNTK. No Need To Know. They might have told you, if you’d ever bothered to ask, but I guess you never did.”
Corgan rubbed his arms. The tunnel was cold.
“I know you’re a time genius, Corgan, so how long have we been out here?” Sharla asked.
“Thirteen minutes, fourteen and fifty-six hundredths seconds. That’s how long it was when you asked, but whenever I count in hundredths of second, by the time I say the words—”
“Better get back in your Box soon,” she interrupted. “You’re lucky you have a nice warm Box to live in.”
“Everyone lives in a nice Box,” he said.
“No they don’t,” she told him, sounding impatient. “They want you to believe it’s true, but it isn’t. Most people live in cramped dormitories. You’ve been raised in a Box because you’re special. I am, too, but I learned how to get out and navigate the city when I was eight years old, and They never knew. They still don’t know.”
Corgan wanted to reach and touch her; instead he asked questions to keep her there. “What will happen if They find out you escape all the time?”
“Nothing. I’ll go into Reprimand again, but what else can They do to me? They need me. I’m the best code breaker that ever lived. I’m the best by about a factor of ten.”
She was either incredibly brave or incredibly foolish. “What about contamination?” he demanded. “Won’t you get infected if you keep leaving your Box?”
“The whole city is pretty much infection free,” she answered. “The Supreme Council keeps scaring you about contamination because They want to you to stay isolated.”
She’s got to be wrong, Corgan thought. At least about that part of it. He wished he could challenge her on it, but they were running out of time.
“You’d better go—you don’t want to get caught on your first time out,” she said.
“First? Are we going to do this again?”
“Do you want to?”
“Yes!” Even though he remembered to whisper, the fervor in his voice echoed off the steel walls of the tunnel.
“Okay. Tomorrow night. Same time.” Her fingertips grazed his cheek.
Not till he was back in his Box trying to settle himself in the aerogel did Corgan realize he’d never even seen her. Was she the beautiful Sharla he’d first met under the palm trees, or was she something else?
Four
“This is the land the War will be fought over,” Mendor announced. “The Isles of Hiva.”
The name meant nothing to Corgan. Tired, because he hadn’t slept much the night before, he slumped into his aerogel as Mendor droned on about the Isles’ location: between 7 degrees 50 minutes and 10 degrees 35 minutes south latitude, and between 138 degrees 25 minutes and 140 degrees 50 minutes west longitude. In the Central Pacific.
Slowly, the virtual re-creation of the Isles of Hiva filled the space around him, and Corgan came wide awake. Ocean waves splashed against rocky shores. The smooth circular trunks of palm trees rose high into canopies of flat, spiny fronds. Birds soared overhead and launched themselves into the water to spear fish. A warm, humid breeze skimmed Corgan’s skin. The thunder of surf felt like heartbeats.
“Twenty volcanic islands forming two main groups …” Mendor the Father Professor’s soliloquy continued, boring and lifeless. How could Mendor talk about something so beautiful and make it so dull, Corgan wondered. Was Sharla seeing and hearing this? She probably knew all about the Isles of Hiva. She’d probably broken into the code and discovered them for herself.
“A hundred years ago, seven thousand people lived on these islands,” Mendor went on. “Fifty years ago, they all died in an epidemic of pakoko. That’s what the natives called a particularly rapid-spreading form of tuberculosis.”
“Then why are we fighting to win the islands if they’re contaminated?” Corgan asked.
Mendor’s color changed; it grew softer. “I’m glad you’re interested enough to finally ask a question,” he told Corgan. “Because amazingly enough, the islands are no longer contaminated.”
“How’d that happen?” Corgan asked. He didn’t really care so much about the answer; sometimes he just kept asking questions because it made Mendor happy. He felt guilty about what he’d done last night—sneaking out of his Box. If he pretended, now, to be really interested in the lecture, it might quiet his own conscience.
Mendor’s image grew even brighter with pleasure. “As you know, Corgan, five satellites still orbit the Earth to send back—”
“Yes, I know.”
“In 2073, scientists put together twenty years’ worth of data they’d gathered about the Isles of Hiva. It was discovered that the contamination was gone. A submarine party of robots landed there to confirm the data.”
Corgan lifted his hand to feel the soft virtual breeze. Mendor went on, “Why have the islands become danger free? No one is certain. Perhaps because for a dozen years in a row, they received excessive rainfall—a hundred inches each year. That might have washed them clean and swept all the pakoko bacteria into the cold ocean current that flows north from the Antarctic, past the islands. Then the cold current might have killed the bacteria. Whatever the reason, the islands are safe for people to live on again.”
Now Corgan really was interested. “You said the scientists figured this out in 2073. This is 2080. Why’d They wait so long to have a War over these islands?”
Mendor became a pulsing fount of radiant androgynous light. “Because of you, Corgan! For all these years the Supreme Council has used every excuse They could think of to delay this War. They stalled Their negotiations with the other confederations. They wrangled over rules and details. They demanded additional meetings and procrastinated at those meetings until it became embarrassing. All because of you. They were waiting for you to grow up, Corgan. Waiting for your skills to peak. And it’s happened! Your abilities go far beyond anything ever measured before.” Mender’s light dimmed a bit. “Sharla’s, too, of course.”
There were so many things he wanted to ask her. Things he could never ask Mendor. What was the Mutant Pen she’d mentioned? He’d never heard of it. What was it like in Reprimand? Why did she take so many chances?
But when they met in the tunnel that night he forgot all his questions. Sharla had brought a light.
“It’s not very bright—it’s just a piezoelectric stone. You squeeze this clamp on it and the stone glows for a second. I wanted to get a look at you,” she said.
