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drshaffopolis · 8 years ago

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More Gallagher than Milgrim

“Okay, ready?”

“Ready.”

“Let’s sweep the garage.”

“Just a crawler over here, nothing I can’t handle,” Jason kept his fireteam updated as he gunned down a small robot, “I see three heading your way, Admiral. Look like maybe brutes … can’t make them out from here.”

“I’ve got your back,” Carrie decloaked, taking down one of them by surprise with a shimmering energy sword, “Uh, bad move!” She jumped back, just out of the reach of the two creatures angrily swiping their claws in her direction.

“Show off,” she said, as two perfectly aimed sniper rifle shots pierced their skulls.

“Nice work, Admiral.” Jason’s voice again, “Hey, check it out, there’s a car over here.”

“I call gunner seat!” Andrew opened the car door, as it was rocked by two explosions, “Shit! I didn’t realize there were traps in this game mode! Shit! I’m a dead. What a freaking noob move.”

In the upper-right corner of Jason’s screen, the name RearAdmiralPoopants2029 turned from blue to red.

“Any other vehicles in the garage?” Carrie asked.

“I don’t see any. We’ll just have to see how far we can get on foot without our sniper.”

“Right, opening the door… Oh, great, a big empty fucking field. That’s perfect!”

“Think you have enough cloak to make it to that clump of trees?”

“I can try. I say we both run for it; you’re not gonna do much good back there with just an assault rifle.”

One-third of the way across the field, an opposing team’s vehicle drove toward them, spraying fire from its mounted machine gun. Jason had nowhere to hide.

Carrie’s cloak gave out before she made it to the cover of the trees; she listened to the other team’s taunts as they ran her over.

* * * * *

“Well, that was embarrassing.” Andrew said at the between-rounds loading screen.

“Yeah… what are we going to do next time? Does anyone have a bomb defusal skill?” Jason asked.

“No, sorry.”

“No. Is Scout online? He always equips something like that,” Carrie was asking rhetorically, of course – she could see as well as anyone that he wasn’t.

“Probably doing his biology project that’s not due until next week,” said Andrew, “we go to school together IRL and he’s, like, a total goody two-shoes.”

“Ugh god, don’t remind me how much of an old lady I am,” said Carrie, the 53-year-old sales executive, who couldn’t decide whether winning or losing was more embarrassing, but was having fun, anyway.

"Well, I have one multi-tool. But it looked like there were two bombs,” said Jason.

Andrew suggested, “I can take out one with a grenade—”

Carrie interrupted him, “Sure, yeah, let’s just blow up the car. Fuck that car, we don’t need it, anyway.”

“No, no, the model TX just has a cargo compartment up front, so setting off that mine would barely affect it. The explosion will probably trigger the other mine, but if we time it perfectly, you can probably get in there with the multi-tool and disable the second one.”

“How does he know that? How do you know that? I’m picturing, like, fake car schematics on posters on your wall. You’d better be an automotive engineer when you grow up.” One never quite knew which side of the line between sarcasm and earnestness Carrie was on.

“He’s not even old enough to have a job, he has time for this stuff,” Jason was a college student, home for winter break. “You and me have more important things to learn.”

“You’re probably a really annoying intern. I take my coffee with two sugars. Write that down.”

“Looks like the rest of the teams finished the round,” Andrew read out loud, “49th out of 50. Yeah! We weren’t dead last. Suck it, SquadDoobieDoodz!”

“Whoo!”

* * * * *

The second round went more smoothly – the team’s plan to disable the bombs worked, they drove their slightly damaged car out of the garage and scored 7 kills before getting knocked out.

“24th out of 50, not too bad!” Jason exclaimed.

“Okay, kids, I do have work tomorrow, so I’ll be signing off on that wining note.”

“Good night, Carrie.”

“Peace.”

“Hey, looks like Scout’s online. Hopefully he’ll join the party.”

“Yeah, we’ll kick ass with him in here. I’ll ping him and tell him to play his infiltrator.”

“Leave it to Carrie to play an infiltrator without any ranks in explosives,” they chuckled.

“Um, guys?”

“Carrie, sticking around for another game after all?”

“Well… I can’t sign off.”

“Neither can I, that what I try to tell my parents every night.”

“No, I mean, I… Can’t. Sign. Off.”

“Just plug your headset into the charger, it’ll be fine. You’re worse than my grandma.”

“No, I really can’t!”

“It’ll boot you for inactivity. You don’t care about your stats, anyway, stop being such a drama queen.”

“I mean, I can’t take my headset off.” Carrie sounded seriously distressed.

“What, how can you not take your headset off? Like, you’re trapped in the game?”

“Stop being so gullible, Andrew,” Jason said, “She’s messing with us.”

“No, I’m really not, I swear. I think I might be having … I don’t know, a stroke? I can’t move my arms. If I give you my address, can you call the police?”

“Okay, but if I call the police and it’s a prank, it’s gonna be a prank on yourself.” Jason started to sound more serious, “I’ll get a pen.”

“Hurry, please… I’m having some trouble remembering my address… it must be aphasia or something…”

“I hope you’re okay. I’ll send a card to the hospital,” added Andrew.

“What the fuck! Oh my god. Oh my god. I can’t take off my headset, either.”

“Now you’re both definitely pranking me. I wasn’t born yesterday.”

“No, Andrew, try to take yours off.”

“I’m not going to fall for it,” he lied. Then a few seconds later, “… oh my god, I can’t either!”

“How is this possible?” Jason asked.

“It really shouldn’t be,” Carrie was trying calm herself down, “these things tie into your senses of sight and hearing, but they can’t control your motor cortex. The FDA inspects these; there’s no way.”

“Well, maybe it’s an illusion of some sort… MOM! MOM!” Jason was yelling through his microphone, “Don’t worry, they’ll hear me.”

A few tense moments passed.

“MOM! I’m serious; come help me! I’m stuck! I need help! DAD!”

Another tense minute.

“Okay, okay, nobody panic. Even if we can’t talk out load, or whatever, someone is going to stumble onto one of us pretty soon. Either Andrew’s mom is going to call him for bed, or something. We’ll all be fine, and someone at OctopusGames is going to go to jail.”

Jason didn’t like the idea of sitting around. “If we’re going to be trapped in here for another hour or two, maybe we should explore. Try to figure out what’s going on? If they’re doing some illegal experiment, we’re better off knowing what it is, right?”

* * * * *

The team walked cautiously out of the garage. The saw a grenade explosion halfway across the field, and an opposing player spinning around and firing wildly into the air. He started walking toward them, fired a few more shots into the air, and continued walking in their direction.

“Looks like we’re not the only ones. He wants to talk.” Jason also fired wildly into the air, displaying their new ad-hoc signal for non-aggression.

BOOM! The player who had been walking toward them was gone in a blast from a tank that just rolled over a hill.

“Back to the garage!” Andrew yelled, “Looks like not everyone got the memo!”

They ran inside and sealed the door.

“This is ridiculous, there’s no way they can actually hurt us,” Carrie said, “for all we know, getting killed is our ticket out.”

“Maybe, but if you’re wrong, how hard would it suck if we had to stare at a loading screen in silence all night until Andrew’s mom comes to take him to school?”

After a few more minutes, they all heard an announcement, as if over a loudspeaker, “All players, please congregate in the valley for further instructions. Do not fire on each other unless ordered. Failure to comply will result in ejection from the game.”

“Do we listen?” asked Andrew.

“I don’t think we have a choice,” said Jason.

“We might at least get some answers,” agreed Carrie.

* * * * *

Players from dozens of teams were gathered in the valley. The valley was ringed by tanks, and hovering helicopters. In the center, a ring of soldiers surrounded a tank. These new characters were wearing military police uniforms, in stark contrast to the colorful anime sci-fi outfits that the players were wearing. The military police had firepower at their disposal on an order of magnitude greater than that of all the players combined.

The one standing on top of the tank was speaking through a bullhorn, “We’ve brought you all here for a little experiment. You’ll be participating in a series of drills, and will be released in 6 hours, when we’re all finished.”

Whispers and mumbles cascaded through the crowd. A shot rang out, hit the speaker in the head. The game character slumped over, dead. The helicopters fired a salvo, obliterating the shooter, his teammates, and a few other players unfortunate enough to be standing nearby.

Another MP climbed onto the tank and calmly continued, “Fighting against us is futile. We’re the moderators. If you break the rules, you’ll be killed.”

“You’d better have a good lawyer!” Shouted Carrie. “I refuse to participate!”

“When the time comes, we shall see. For now, I want you all to stay in this valley, except for you, you, you, and you.” MPs ushered four players from different teams into a prison bus.

* * * * *

Over the next few hours, players were ushered out, onto the bus, a few at a time. Everyone was talking amongst themselves.

“Where are they going?”

“So far, no one has come back.”

“What’s happening to them.”

“Maybe that’s the experiment. To see how long we put up with it.”

“What are we going to do? We can’t fight them.”

“What if getting killed is the ticket out? And we’re all afraid for nothing. I mean, it’s game. We’re wearing $500 headsets.”

“What if the bus is the ticket out? I mean, like, if someone figures out how to unplug, instead of the game character disappearing like normal, they just program it to hop on a bus.”

“If someone figured out how to unplug, wouldn’t they just disappear?”

“I mean, that’s what usually happens, but it wouldn’t be that big of a modification to have your avatar stay even if you unplugged, just like an NPC.”

“And then they’d program it to get onto the bus?”

“Maybe.”

Similar conversations were happening all throughout the valley.

Jason, Andrew, and Carrie stuck together. “We need a plan,” Carrie said, “but we also need to be careful; if they’re experimenting on us, there’s no way they can’t hear what we’re saying.”

Someone behind them coughed. They turned to see the floating text above his head, it read ScoutRegiment4lyfe, the fourth member of their squad.

“Scout! You signed on just as this weirdness was starting. Did you hear about it? Was it on Twitter? Did you come to get us out?” Jason was excited.

Scout didn’t say anything, but instead of motioned into the distance. Of course! The clubhouse; why didn’t we think of that before! The four of them split up; they had the first step of a plan.

* * * * *

Jason sensed his opportunity when another bus departed – the guards were distracted and not looking at him. Sure, they probably had some centralized tracking that told them where everyone went, but a handful of players among hundreds could sneak off without anyone noticing, so long as no one was looking directly at them when they did it, right?

Jason made his way out of the valley into a forest. The trees grew denser, as he approached the edge of the world. He stepped between the trees, until he found himself unable to continue moving. Here, even where there were gaps between the trees, an invisible wall blocked him. He turned “north” and kept moving, until he reached a small hut with no doors or windows.

Jason faced away from the hut, and did a spinning backflip onto the roof. Thud! He never got that right on the first try. Again… thud!

On the third try, instead of hitting the roof, he went straight through as if it weren’t there. The walls of the hut were only partially visible from the inside. One wall had a giant black triangle with pulsating edges. Another was see-through from this side. Players were clearly not meant to be in this part of the level. It was a design flaw; almost every map in every game had something like it if you looked hard enough. More importantly, the game’s built-in tracking and logging functions didn’t work, here. Unscrupulous players would often come in here to activate cheat programs; it was the one place they wouldn’t get caught and banned. Carrie, Andrew, and Scout were already there, along with two players they didn’t recognize – their gamer tags read JoeyBiddleRocks! and CowboysFan45252.

“Okay, I think that’s everyone we were expecting from our team,” said Scout, “Now, as for the plan to get out of here…”

“We know a glitch that’ll crash the game,” said CowboysFan, “sometimes we do it to troll if we’re losing.”

“Ass-hats.” Carrie hated playing against people like him, but that seemed unimportant, now. “Whatever, I guess you’re just kids.”

“Actually, I’m a corporate lawyer by day, believe it or not.” That was JoeyBiddle.

“Even worse.”

“Anyway, look, the way it works is this. If you hit a friendly tank with enough explosives to flip it over, while the tank is firing its main gun, it crashes the game.”

“So, that means we need to capture one of those tanks, and then we’re going to need like … 5 rocket launchers?” Jason asked.

“Two will do it if you put five or six mines under it.” Rocket launchers appeared, instantly, in JoeyBiddle’s and CowboysFan’s hands. “Here, trade weapons.” Andrew dropped his sniper rifle on the floor and grabbed the rocket launcher from CowboysFan. Another appeared to replace it a second later.

“Pretty handy cheat.” They all equipped themselves with rockets and mines.

“Now we just need the tank,” Scout sounded optimistic, “Carrie, you maxed out your stealth ranks as usual, right?”

“Of course, but… are we sure this is going to work? I mean, is crashing the game going to get us out of here?”

“Well we have to try something, are there other ideas?” asked Jason.

“Civil disobedience,” suggested Carrie.

“What’s that?” asked Andrew.

“What do you mean, ‘what’s that’? How do they not teach you that in school? The civil rights movement? Come on. Like, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and all! Ring a bell?”

“I have this feeling I really should know who they are.”

“Joey? Didn’t you just say you were a grown up? And a lawyer? Tell me you’re joking!”

“No... No, I’m not… This is really weird… could they be blocking out our thoughts or parts of our memories, too?”

“That’s insane!”

“All of this is insane! Look, we have to move!”

“Okay, okay. I’ll use my cloak to get into the tank and execute the driver. Let’s try this.”

* * * * *

They filtered back into the valley one at a time, so as not to get caught. There were still hundreds of players milling around, talking amongst themselves. There were a few dozen corpses, as well, as if another firefight had broken out. Hopefully someone else hadn’t tried their plan. If the moderators were prepared for it, it’d never work.

Carrie hid behind another player and engaged her cloak. She stepped out. No one seemed to react. So far, so good. She stepped slowly toward the tank. (cloak at 85%) She very carefully tiptoed through the ring of guards. (cloak at 30%) She quietly climbed on top of the tank, and slipped through the hatch just as her cloak gave out. The driver was facing the controls, and didn’t see her. For a moment, she could see her own avatar put its hand over his mouth as the game transitioned into its “assassination” animation.

Now, I just need another minute for my cloak to recharge; I can get out and under the tank to drop these mines and hop back in. This is the easy part, thought Carrie to herself.

At that moment, she heard a clank behind her. Someone had tossed a stun grenade into the tank’s hatch. The gig was up.

For the next 30 seconds, all she could see was her health indicator and heads-up display. Her ammunition bar went to zero – someone had taken her weapons. When her avatar’s vision returned, she was on the bus, along with the rest of their band of conspirators, with several MPs.

“I’m sorry, guys, I let you down.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” said Jason. “That stun grenade came from another player. They had the same plan as we did, and didn’t realize you were in there. It was just bad timing.”

“Quiet! We’re taking you to a detention facility.” Yelled one of the MPs, “You’re going to be disciplined.”

Carrie didn’t acknowledge the MP, and kept talking to her comrades, “A detention facility? On a bus? In a game world? When will any of this start making sense?”

“I said quiet!” The guard hit her avatar with the butt of his rifle, and Carrie cried out in pain. It sounded real.

“I will not be silent. I refuse to comply!” He struck her again.

“La la la. I’m still talking. La la la.”

“Another word, and we shoot you,” two of the MPs aimed their weapons at her head.

“Whatever, enough of this bullshit. Kill me! I’ll stare at a loading screen for a few hours. My body is probably lying in a hospital bed by now. And I’ll see you on a real prison bus.”

Pop! Pop! Pop! Carrie’s avatar stopped moving. For a what seemed like nearly an hour, no one said anything.

Finally, once the guards turned their focus toward looking out the windows, Scout whispered, “She’s not really dead, right? She can’t be. I mean, her real dead body, on her couch in her house? Or in a hospital? That’s murder.”

Jason answered, “My new theory is that this is all an illusion. It feels like hours, but it’s really only been a few seconds, like a dream. They can’t make us feel pain and we’re not actually paralyzed.”

“Her screams sounded awful real.”

“So do our guns, and they’re not. I mean, for all we know that wasn’t even her voice. You can pipe any sound through a video game.”

“Maybe we should all get ourselves killed.”

“Maybe.”

For the moment, however, no one was willing to risk it.

* * * * *

“Jason! Dinner’s almost ready!”

Jason stood up from his desk, closed the lid on his laptop, and walked down the stairs. He could smell the tomato sauce and meatballs. His parents always cooked his favorite comfort foods when he was home for the holidays.

“Playing that new game again?” his dad looked up from the newspaper to ask.

“Actually, I was reading about it. Sort of. It was a story about AI research.”

“AI research,” his mom said, “You work hard enough between your classes and internship that you need to just relax this week.”

“It was really interesting, though. Octopus is partnering a company called with DaveyAI—”

“Hah! I met their founder a few years ago at a conference!” His dad put down the paper, “What a quack! He’s one of those ‘singularity’ nut-jobs, thinks he’s going to live forever in a computer, like a god. You know, five years ago, this guy bought a bunch of warehouse drones and had them act out the Milgrim experiments?”

His mom chimed in, “Are you talking about BattleBotGhazi?”

“Yeah, that’s the one, he had these things ‘torturing’ each other, and talked big philosophy, ‘oh the ethical ramifications of the drone inflicting pain on each other because they were ordered to.’ He got some bad press and relished it. For a minute, he got to be the guy who was starting the conversation: Is it time for us to start treating robots as living things? To empathize with them? Do they have rights?”

“So, what happened?”

“Well, it all lasted about a week, before we collectively realized how absurd the situation was. I mean, here’s a bunch of inanimate objects, that are programmed to roll up and down aisles until they find a certain barcode, and literally nothing else, and he’s trying to get a reaction from all of us by having them smash each other to bits?”

His mom laughed, “A video went around where the drones had these big comical-looking mallets attached to them; the whole thing was more Gallagher than Milgram.

“Tell us, what’s he up to this time?”

“He said in the interview that they were going to use players’ in-game data from Octopus’s shooters to make simulated versions of our personalities, then put those simulations into various scenarios in the game to see how they respond. I don’t know how I feel about my data being used to create a copy of my personality; a computer program running around thinking it was me.”

“Hmmm… Let’s take checkers, for example. I could write a program that recorded you for a bunch of games, analyzed your play style, and emulated you.”

“Yeah, that’d be pretty easy.”

“And if mom played that checkers program, she wouldn’t be able to tell that she wasn’t actually playing her son. My checkers-bot would be indistinguishable from the real you.”

His mom pointed out, “But that’s not a real Turing Test. Sure, the checkers program would play checkers just like you, but it’s still just a few hundred lines of code. It wouldn’t, quote unquote, ‘think it was you,’ it wouldn’t ‘think’ anything at all.”

“Right, it’d fool you perfectly into thinking it was me, but only up until you tried to do anything besides play it in checkers. Then it would obviously not be me.”

“Now, using data from a shooter, a much more complex program that took a big team years to develop would be more impressive… especially if they fed in information from your headset chats.”

“I get it, though. You’re saying it wouldn’t be fundamentally different from the checkers program.”

“Exactly. A really good program might even be able to simulate your voice, chat about game tactics, but it wouldn’t be you.”

“It wouldn’t know anything about you that you didn’t talk about in the game. It wouldn’t have the same skills you do in the real world, it wouldn’t know what you learned in class last week, it wouldn’t even know what you had for breakfast unless you talked about it while playing the game.”

“Yeah, it’s still kind of creepy, though.”

“Well, it’s a privacy issue if, nothing else. You sign one of those EULAs, you don’t expect them to use your game activity for something like this. They should have to ask permission.”

His mom turned off the stove. “Let’s eat!”

#sci-fi & fantasy #scifi #ai #fiction #video games #singularity #short story

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