This wasn’t just about resurrecting the company’s old research into creating a fearless group consciousness, smarter and more strategic with its many minds. It was about bringing all the old research ideas they’d gotten in trouble for together. Reinventing it with the gaming creator’s technology and theories to make it a reality. The group mind in front of me was simply the first phase.
If what the man said was true, then the next step would be creating the capacity for the Warheads to control actual soldiers in the field. It was so far past wrong, so far past illegal . . . this was playing with people’s minds without bothering to give them a reason. It was stealing their lives. If the military said no, someone else would say yes. Other people with tasks that required intense planning, bad people with deep pockets who would want to be able to control the bodies they sent into the line of fire, or into a building to steal some priceless target.
Someone would always say yes.
I had to try to destroy this here, now, in its infancy, before it could go any further.
I slid my hands into my messenger bag and grappled gently to find the prism flare I’d brought with me, a treasure from Dad’s cache I hoped was significant enough to get this job done solo. At close quarters, it would be bright enough to blind everyone in the room temporarily.
A vibration distracted me.
My phone. I grabbed for it, looking up to make sure no one had spotted me.
The Warheads being in the sim continued to buy me cover, as it had kept any of them from noticing me lurking in the shadows. They were running a complicated formation in the first floor of the building—one soldier shot an enemy combatant wearing civilian clothes but wielding a rifle, and then the squad went into the room past him and planted small cylindrical objects in the corners.
“Now clear out of there,” Mr. Sympathetic commanded them. His attention was trained on the test subjects and their actions in the scene.
So I took a chance and checked my phone
SmallvilleGuy: Ready? The researcher decided to help. Backup’s coming to cover you.
My knees went briefly weak with relief. He had my back after all.
I sent back: When the tones start.
The two of us had to disrupt the audiovisual cue that synced the Warheads’ minds together and allowed the group link to occur in the real-sim—and, unbeknownst to those running the experiment, outside it. Doing it at the right time inside and outside the sim should break the bond as their neural pathways resealed to protect their minds. According to the game creator’s theory, at least.
That theory had better be right.
I deleted my messages with SmallvilleGuy so that no one could find them if I got caught, and then put my hands back in position on the fist-sized faceted cylinder of the flare. I continued to skirt the edges of the illuminated scene, waiting for our moment.
I watched as the black-clad troops left the compound and gathered together on the far side of a stretch of desert—cauterized by chaos, running civilians and commandos that were enemies in the simulation. They faced the large complex they’d been creeping around in, setting explosive charges.
They were about to make a successful strike in a zone that was the kind of populated area the military tried not to drop bombs on these days. And a series of charges set on-site, not just where it was convenient, but in the best possible places? That was an all-new level of accuracy, and would be far less controversial than drone strikes.
I stopped when I was right behind Sympathetic Experiment Man. This was all about to go down, for better or for worse.
A soldier in the simulation had a detonator in hand, waiting. Once the explosives went off, today’s simulation would likely end. We would have only the length of the audiovisual cue to get this done. It should be like the shock of coming out of the game too quickly, but magnified in effect. But if we missed the sync signal window, our chances were over.
“You guys seeing this?” the man said into his headset, low. He put his hand to his forehead and said solemnly, like it was the worst development imaginable, “This is it. Success. What are we doing?”
There must have been a response from the control room, because he lowered his hand from his head and raised his voice: “Blow the charges.”
I guess I’d see what kind of assistance the research man was willing to give to make this right.
The avatar in the scene who was holding the detonator pushed down on the top, and the compound exploded in a series of jarring booms.
My heart pounded, seeming as loud in my ears as the fake explosions. But it was as if I could hear the pitch they apparently planned to give the military—maybe even my dad? It would be all about saving civilian lives, with minimal risk to high-value assets (aka Project Hydra), because on-ground soldiers could take it all, at a much lower chance for human error.