Virtual war, p.9
Virtual War, page 9
“What!” Corgan couldn’t believe he’d heard it right.
“They said resources are too limited now and Mutants take up too much time and effort and they don’t pay anything back. From now on, when they’re gestating in the laboratory and tests show that they won’t be normal, they’ll be destroyed. And maybe even these ones in here …” He pointed through the window. “The Supreme Council’s trying to decide whether to let them keep on living.”
“Keep on? … That can’t be true,” Corgan muttered.
“It’s true, all right. And They kept saying how kind They were to me because not only was I allowed to live, but They’ve given me an important job and They’ve cared for me and …” Brig leaned his big head on Corgan’s chest and sobbed.
“Come on, don’t do that,” Corgan said, lifting him up. “Let’s get out of here, Sharla. This was a bad idea.”
The hover car stood waiting, its dome still open. “It’ll be a long ride back,” Sharla said when they were inside. “The track loops through this whole city. It’ll be nice, though; we can lean back and look up at the stars.”
Brig lay between them with his head still on Corgan’s chest, his small hands crossed underneath his chin. The anger Corgan had felt earlier was now gone. Trying to choose his words carefully so he wouldn’t hurt Brig any further, Corgan said, “Genetic engineering might not be such a great idea—for any of us. I mean, why does it have such a high failure rate?”
“Do you know how many genes are in a human being’s DNA?” Sharla asked him. “Two hundred thousand. Each human cell has about forty meters’ worth of DNA that’s only a couple of angstroms wide. And the scientists have to locate the one little part of that DNA that holds the trait they want, and chop it out, and splice it into another section of DNA. And they don’t even have any decent equipment here. All the good stuffy like automated DNA sequencers, is still out there in the contaminated world where we can’t get it. No wonder we have failures.”
Sharla looked down; Brig had fallen asleep on Corgan’s lap. “Poor little guy. He’s not very strong,” she whispered, stroking his damp red hair. “It’s kind of a miracle that he’s made it this far. Most times, after the gene splicing, the altered cells die, or just don’t grow, or else they’re so obviously weird that they get destroyed right in the beginning.”
“How do you know so much about it?” Corgan asked.
“Because,” she said, “that’s what I want to do with my life. I want to be a genetic engineer. I was bred to work with codes. Cryptanalysis or DNA analysis—it’s all coding.”
He wasn’t especially surprised. Mostly he felt curious about just how she’d been bred, and what had made her the way she was. But he didn’t want to pry. Anyway, he was even more curious about himself.
“Where did I come from?” he asked. “I mean, how did they make me? Do you know?”
“Sure. I looked you up. You got your fast reflexes and precise hand control from your mother and father.”
“You mean Mendor?”
“Corgan, Mendor is a program. You’re a human being. I mean your biological parents. The sperm and the egg that were taken out of the frozen-tissue bank and combined in a test tube to make you. That, plus some traits spliced in from donor tissue.”
“Does that mean? …” He was trying hard to understand it. “That I have two parents, or more than that? And anyway, who are they? Or who were they?”
Sharla answered, “It says in your records that half of your original genetic material came from—get ready for this—a champion tennis player who died in 2057.”
“Mother or father?” He could say those words without any emotional tug, because there were no human memories attached to them.
“Mother, if you want to use the old-fashioned term. The other half, the father half I guess you’d call it, was a surgeon famous for reattaching severed nerves. Little tiny nerve endings.” She smiled at him. “Then you got bits of DNA from other people added to you for time measurement, stamina, and hand strength.”
Corgan raised his agile right hand and flexed it. He flexed his biceps, stretched his arm across the back of the seat, and reached to pull Sharla against him so their cheeks rested together. When she turned to face him, he kissed her. He put both arms around her and kissed her again.
“Stop,” she whispered.
“Why? Because of Brig? He’s asleep.”
“No. Because I asked you to stop.”
Corgan leaned back, confused. “That time before,” he said, “you let me then. In fact, you were the one who kissed me first.”
“It’s different now,” she said.
“How is it different?”
She turned away from him and looked out the dome of the hover car, although there was nothing much to see in the dark corridor. “Because I hardly knew you then, and now I really like you.”
“What?” It made no sense to him.
“Before, I was just sort of—I’m sorry—playing with you, Corgan. It wasn’t fair. You’re so innocent.”
Hurt, he pulled his arm away. “You make it sound like a disease—being innocent,” he told her, sulking.
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “They’ve kept you away from everyone else. They’ve filled you full of Their thoughts and Their words and you only think what They want you to think and say what They tell you to say—”
Is that so wrong, he wondered. Every time he tried to do or say something outside the rules he got yelled at or punished. He couldn’t be like Sharla, who did and said anything she pleased and always came out of it just fine.
“Sharla,” he asked, “when we recite the pledge, are you saying something different?”
She smiled. “So you noticed. I just make up some nonsense words that sound pretty much the same.”
“Like what?”
“You say it first, Corgan. Repeat the pledge.”
He almost raised his hand but caught himself in time; if he had, she’d probably have laughed and counted it as one more sign of his innocence. “I pledge to wage the War with courage, dedication, and honor,” he said slowly, seriously considering the meaning for the first time in a long while.
“Okay, here’s a couple of my variations.” Sharla did raise her hand and, in a mocking, singsong voice, recited, “I wedged the cage’s door with birds and red carnations, Your Honor. Or, I educated Lori, urging meditation upon her. Or, I fled the raging boar with furry dead—”
“You’re making fun of the pledge,” he accused her.
“Why not? The Council forces me to say it. They can’t make me believe in it. To me, the War’s just a silly game.”
Frowning, perplexed, he studied her in the soft light. She was so clever and so pretty that she filled him with all kinds of longings, but she made him feel off balance. “Don’t you believe in anything?” he asked her.
“Sure. I believe in myself.”
Ten
“Brig, wake up. The ride’s over. Time to go home.” When Corgan lifted Brig, he felt dampness on his sleeve where Brig’s sweaty head had lain against it for so long.
“Do you want to tell us your plan now before we get out of the hover car?” Sharla asked.
“No. Too tired. Tomorrow night.” Brig wound his arms around Corgan’s neck and went back to sleep.
“I’ll carry him back to his Box,” Corgan said. “Maybe we ought to meet earlier tomorrow night so he won’t get so tired out.”
“Okay. Nine o’clock tomorrow. ’Night, Corgan.” She brushed his cheek with her lips, which was better than nothing, but not nearly as much as he would have liked.
After depositing Brig in his Box, Corgan walked slowly to his own. No sprinting tonight. It was past midnight. He was tired, too, and he needed to wake himself early in the morning to allow time for an intense physical workout. He flexed his hands, wondering what was wrong with him. In the last warm-up practice game of Triple Multiplex, his score had been off by a half percent. By itself that wasn’t too significant, but added to his disappointing performance on the two previous days, he was down by a total of a percent and a half. That was significant, considering that his performance score should have been going up by that much margin each day, rather than down.
At six the next morning he rolled out of his aerogel bed, pulled on his running shorts, and did forty laps around the virtual track. After that he practiced with weights and after that he did fifteen minutes of finger-flexing exercises. Mendor the Mother watched all this but said nothing, except, “You’ll have to sanitize yourself now to have time for breakfast. Your food intake is important, too, you know.”
Later, when the team assembled in the War-games room, Mendor the Stern Father announced, “We’ll start without a warm-up practice this morning.”
Corgan felt both relief and anxiety. Unless he practiced on games where his earlier scores were already recorded, he had nothing to measure his performance against. He wouldn’t be able to tell whether he’d broken out of his slump and was starting to play better. On the other hand, at least he’d be spared from knowing it if he was playing worse. “May I speak, Mendor? Why is that?” he asked.
“Because in the actual Virtual War, which is eight days from now, there will be no warm-up. All three teams will begin the War at precisely nine A.M. and will play straight through till precisely five P.M. No breaks for meals, for Clean Rooms, not even to wipe the sweat from your brows. Eight straight hours of war!”
Corgan looked at Shark, or at least at her virtual image, which was all he ever saw of her during these practices. First at Sharla, then at Brig. Both of them returned his stare with eyes that showed the same alarm he was feeling. No breaks at all during the War?
“Will we have a chance to practice nonstop like that before the War?” Corgan asked Mendor.
“No. That would be too much of a strain on your health. You must conserve your strength now to maintain your physical peak for the actual War. Which means all extracurricular activity should be limited from now on!” Mendor’s eyes changed into narrowly focused red beams that bored into Corgan.
“Limited,” Mendor had just said. Not “stopped.” “Extracurricular activity” meant their meetings in the tunnel at night. They’d been given a little freedom, but since nothing was ever discussed in actual words, Corgan had to keep feeling his way through each situation and then trying to guess Mendor’s meaning. He didn’t like this; he was too tired to play doublespeak games.
It made him feel like he was slogging through glue. Why couldn’t the Council and Mendor just say what They meant? He stretched his arms and yawned.
“Begin!” Mendor bellowed. Corgan scrambled into position, two seconds late.
If each coming day of practice was going to bring a new element to the War, Corgan hoped They’d added the worst one first. Because it was pretty bad. Blood! They’d thrown in very realistic-looking blood.
Before, when artillery had hit his soldiers, they’d fallen down in a clean simulated death. Today, heads got blown off, arms got severed, and blood spurted so far that Corgan involuntarily jerked back his hands to keep them from getting bathed in gore. And when he did that, he missed the chance to move his soldiers, so more of them got killed. He wanted to scream for Time-out, but for the past two days Time-out hadn’t been allowed. He wanted to close his eyes; instead he forced himself to keep his attention on the game.
Brig seemed calm about the bloodshed. “Over there!” he’d shout into the audio connector. “Watch your flank, Corgan. Move that platoon! Pull them behind that wall.”
Corgan felt his stomach heave as the simulated battleground grew sticky with blood. He swallowed hard and focused on his soldiers, forgetting that they were only virtual images no bigger than the height of his hand. He smelled ozone and smoke and chemicals—
“Gas attack!” Brig screamed. “Get them out of there, Corgan!”
It seemed to go on endlessly. When Mendor finally stopped the game, he glowered at Corgan. “That lasted a full minute longer than the prescribed two-hour interval for today,” Mendor rebuked him. “Why didn’t you call time? If this had been the real Virtual War, Corgan, you’d have forfeited the battle.”
Mortified, Corgan dropped his head onto his folded arms.
It had happened again! He’d lost track of time! It wasn’t that he’d been unable to count time; he’d just become so intent on what he was doing he’d forgotten to count time. At least that’s what he told himself.
“Go to your Clean Rooms,” Mendor ordered. “Then eat. If this were the real War, you’d still be fighting. No breaks. Remember that.”
The afternoon practice was as brutal as the morning had been. When it was over, and after another bath, Corgan fell asleep over his dinner. He woke up, startled, with Mendor the Mother smoothing his hair and telling him to brush his teeth before bedtime.
He met Sharla and Brig in the tunnel that night at nine.
“Pick me up, Corgan,” Brig whimpered. “I’m too tired to stand. I didn’t think it would be this hard.”
Corgan lifted Brig and held him head-high to both himself and Shark. “I wonder why They let us stay out so late last night,” he said. “They knew what today would be like.”
“I think They wanted to make a point,” Sharla answered. “So we’d find out for ourselves that we can’t keep losing sleep. From now on, we’ll have to cut back to fifteen minutes again if we want to stay competitive. Because if you think today was bad, tomorrow will probably be worse.”
The tunnel felt cold and was completely dark; Sharla had forgotten to bring the piezoelectric stone. The three of them huddled together for warmth. “You’d better tell us your plan quick, Brig,” Corgan said. “They’re trying to freeze us.”
“Yeah, just to make sure we know They’re still in charge,” Brig agreed. “That’s their strategy. My plan, okay … but I feel kind of bad, because I wanted to see your faces when I sprang it on you, and now I can’t.”
“Never mind,” Sharla soothed him. “After we hear it, we’ll tell you how we feel about it.”
Brig shivered and his voice shook. “To begin with, They’ve conceded a few things to us, letting us make some choices, like how long we’ll stay out here tonight. That shows how much They’re depending on us. There are no back-up replacements for us, which means They need us really bad. So … if we demand a reward, They’ll have to consider it.”
“What reward? Come on, spit it out, Brig,” Corgan urged.
“We win the War for Them, and They … for our reward …” He paused. Whether it was for dramatic effect or because Brig didn’t feel too confident about what he was going to suggest, Corgan couldn’t be sure.
“We make Them promise to let us live on the Isles of Hiva.”
Corgan sucked in his breath. Shark’s arms tightened around both of them.
“Do you think They’d go for it?” Corgan asked.
“If you guys let me do the negotiating,” Brig answered.
“You?” Corgan sputtered. Weird little Brig, to be trusted with something that enormous, that would change their lives?
Brig’s voice still shook from the cold. “Sharla told me who my biological parents were,” he said. “The male reproductive cell had been frozen for seventy-four years, which maybe is why I became a Mutant, ’cause that’s probably way too long. Anyway, my natural father was the head coach for a basketball team called the Boston Celtics.”
“What’s basketball?” Corgan asked.
“It’s a sport people played back in the old days.
It was fast paced and complicated and my biological father told all the players what to do. Perfect genetics to breed a Strategist. Plus, my mother was the head of a big law firm. She never lost a case in court.” Brig giggled. “What a combination I am! I wish I could have met them.”
“Then he got some extra DNA from a top-ranking diplomat,” Sharla said. “I think Brig can negotiate.”
“If you agree, I’m going to present our demand right before War games tomorrow morning,” Brig said. “They probably won’t give us an answer right away. But who knows? Maybe They will.”
Corgan asked, “Do we have a chance?”
“Why not?” Sharla demanded. “We were bred for something like this, we’ve been trained for this particular job, and when it’s over, They won’t need us anymore. Will They even care where we go? I think it might work, Brig.”
“Yeah, so do I,” Brig agreed.
“That means,” Corgan said, “from now on we have to play perfectly—no mistakes—to show we can win for Them.”
Silence. Neither Brig nor Sharla said anything, and Corgan squirmed. Both of them had been playing just fine, all along.
“Look, I know my proficiency’s been off,” he said. “But I’m working on it. It’s under control now.”
After another pause, Brig mentioned, “You went a minute overtime today.”
“I said I’m working on it!”
In the dark, he couldn’t read their faces. “Hey, if They promise us the Isles of Hiva, I’ll get my winning edge back for sure. I’ll play my brains out.”
“That’s what we were hoping,” Brig said. “I mean—”
“Anyway, we don’t need to worry,” Corgan said with bravado. “We’re unbeatable. Even if we don’t play as well as we used to, we’re still way better than the other two teams. Mendor told me that.”
“When?”
“What does it matter when? We were genetically engineered, remember? To be the best in the world. Right? Right, Sharla?”
Quietly, she answered, “So were the players on the other two teams.”
“What!” both Corgan and Brig exclaimed in disbelief.
“All three teams will consist of genetically engineered players.”
“How’d you find out?” Brig asked grimly.
“How do I find out anything?” she answered. “Trust me. It’s true.”
