The room was dark except for an illuminated scene in the middle of it, one filled with dust and desert and rattling explosions and muted screams—or, rather, a holo-scape version of those things that looked and sounded real until I blinked.
Until I looked harder to see what was really going on, and reminded myself that I wasn’t in the game. I was standing right here.
The floor of the hall was solid under my feet, and my hand was braced against the doorjamb. When I moved it to pinch my other arm, to be sure I was right, it hurt.
But I didn’t let a sound escape. No one noticed I was there. Not the miked project manager in the room or the Warheads arrayed in a circle of chairs around the scene. Everyone was too riveted to the experiment underway. I edged around the room, staying in the shadows and taking it all in, doing my best to understand what this was.
The tech might be similar to the game’s—the Warheads had on holosets that resembled to the ones I’d worn—but it wasn’t quite the same. This was a whole new sinister fourth world brought into being. One simply about war, with a tableau of a desert battle.
The game was the clear jumping-off point, but instead of the holosets projecting the war sim directly in front of their eyes, immersing them in it the usual way, these projected out, a spray of lights coalescing into the detailed scene in the center of the floor in front of the Warheads. That projection was what had thrown me off for those first confusing moments.
The lone researcher in the room held a clipboard and appeared to be conflicted as he watched the scene. He spoke up to give reluctant orders to the Warheads.
“Unit formation B,” he said. His was the voice from the other day. “Direct your avatars to infiltrate the compound to lay charges now.”
Devin and Anavi were in seats next to each other, slightly reclined, their lips moving occasionally.
The battle scenario on display was what people who played videogames thought warfare was like. But I knew better. I might hate bullies, but at that moment I hated the people at Advanced Research Laboratories more.
This was what I’d come here for. This was it. What I had to stop.
Inside the simulation, there were black-clad figures of soldiers, moving in a kind of sync that would be any commander’s glory. Here in the room, the Warheads had placid faces, divorced from feeling any of the fear and chaos, from the hot possibility that the sand would blow up under their feet and steal their lives, from everything actual soldiers in the field coped with every day.
They weren’t fighting one on one. No, that would be too easy.
The scene shifted, parts of it coming in and out of focus.
The Warheads were undertaking a group assault on a large compound. The power of them acting as individuals but part of one ingeniously strategic mind was a beautiful—and terrible—thing to witness. They raced toward the compound, and then into it, moving fearlessly throughout the scene, never a false step. A soldier’s form even shooed a little girl out of the way once they were inside, pushing her back toward the exit.
The guy monitoring the results spoke into the headset mike he was wearing, not raising his voice so the Warheads would take it as a command. “There’s one of the boss’s selling points. Humanitarian actions.”
He must be talking to the control room monitors. He didn’t sound like the compassion on display in the game was anything more than a kind of currency that their overlord would turn into profit.
My plan was a risk without SmallvilleGuy to help, even if it was a calculated one. Standing here, I knew it was worth taking.
It might work.
And Devin and Anavi—and the rest of the Warheads—would be hurt more by where this clearly illegal experiment was leading, if it wasn’t stopped.
You couldn’t conscript a group of teenage gamers into a “research project” on team gaming dynamics and then play around with their brains until you made them into a weapon. But Advanced Research Laboratories was attempting just that.
The man watched, sad and riveted, as the forms being directed by the Warheads raced around the scene. “They’re doing it—he’ll try to sell the military guys on this now for sure,” he said. “You can all say this is right, but it’s not. You’ll tell them that this group can direct the ground troops better than the best trained officers in the world could do on their own, and it’ll be true. They’d never have agreed, but once he shows them this, he’ll convince them to let us tech up real troops for these guys to drive in the field. He’ll make us do it.”
I almost gasped, but I managed to hold in the sound. Everything came together for me.