A Time for Heroes
by Edward M. Lerner
Travis Logan was a reader, a movie buff, a TV addict, and a gamer. In short, he was a lover of stories—but not just any story held his interest. He reveled in grand sagas, epic explorations, daunting quests, and perilous adventures. The more larger than life, the more fascinating the story—
And the more Travis’s own mundane existence suffered by comparison.
In the stories he loved, dire circumstances forged ordinary people into heroes. The situation might be cruel or capricious, the work of an implacable enemy or of vast, impersonal forces. A debilitating illness. A car crash. Wartime horrors. Zombie plagues. A lover in peril.
It could be anything. But it had to be something.
Alas, for as far back as Travis could remember, he had had no such formative moment. There was no deep, meaningful lesson to define him. In all his humdrum life, there had been no opportunity to seize, no peril to overcome, no noble sacrifice to make, no grand challenge to which he might valiantly have risen. The one incident involving Travis that might fairly be called seminal was, quite literally, seminal, and his parents’ experience rather than his own.
No, Travis had never had a life-altering moment. Perhaps that was why his life was so commonplace and seemingly of no account.
The thing about life-altering moments is, they do not often announce themselves…
Mortars roared and the ground shook beneath Travis. Rock chips flew from the boulders behind which he crouched, as bullets screamed past. Tendrils of mist writhed overhead, lurid with crisscrossing laser-sight beams. His hands hurt from clutching a rifle so tightly.
This was the best game ever.
Here was far more real than the sensory-immersion tank in which Travis knew himself to truly be. His senses were alive, alert to the smallest detail. Hands down, this was the best virtual-reality environment he had ever experienced.
He looked around. His uniform, even the armored vest, was all tans and greens: forest camouflage. Every blade of grass was distinct—except, he noted, when looking out the corner of his eye. The clouds far overhead were like that, too, and the texture of the boulders: details fading on the periphery to conserve computing power. Done right, the optimization shouldn’t have been visible. It needed tweaking.
But he wasn’t here to critique the graphics or sound effects so authentic that he felt them in his bones or the imaginary pebble so convincingly digging into his butt. His job was putting the game through its paces. Playing.
Only this hardly felt like play. A mortar round landed, the closest yet, shaking the ground. Dirt, twigs, and pebbles rained down on him. Soon the imaginary mortar would imaginarily find its target. It’s only a game, Travis told himself. Take your time. Scope things out.
Boulders ringed him. He crept toward a gap between the rocks to peek out.
Travis never saw the sniper who killed him.
Bullets whizzed overhead, as many as before. But unlike before, he was going to move. He had a mission to accomplish. He was Zorro with an M-16.
Travis ripped open vest pocket flaps, the Velcro zzps inaudible amid the gunfire. Eventually he found a little mirror on a short handle, a gadget like a dentist might use. That was new, and he smiled. You had to love online gaming. Unseen developers had added the mirror to his gear.
Carefully maneuvering the mirror between and above various boulders, he scoped out his surroundings and even spotted a few of the opposition.
His watch was busted, by a bit of ricocheting rock perhaps. He estimated the time between mortar rounds by his pulse. Call it eight seconds.
When the next round hit, Travis was on his feet while the ground still shivered. Under cover of the smoke and still-falling dirt, he dashed for the nearby woods.
A camouflaged enemy, smirking, emerged from behind a tree and shot him.
Spraying the trees with automatic-weapons fire as he ran, Travis made it safely into the woods. The enemy side kept learning—but he learned faster.
He caught his breath, standing over an enemy soldier dramatically dying. Too Hollywood, but not bad acting for an artificial intelligence. In gamer-speak, a bot. A game-playing, robotic character. That’s what all his opponents were: software.
Software embodied in graphics so—graphic—that Travis had to look away. He felt queasy. He told himself he was being ridiculous. The throbbing wounds were no more real than the characters he was here to train.
He was a pro gamer. Lots of companies brought him in-house for a day or a week before releasing a new virt game, to run a final checkout. To test, not to put too fancy a term on it, untainted by knowledge or preconceptions about the game.
But this was much more than testing, as vague as his host had been.
Scripted bots were so last century. They did what the developers instructed and no more. Watch a scripted bot for a few games and you could kill it every time. Where was the fun in that? Or the repeat customers to keep renting time in the very expensive VR tanks?
So most virts added randomness to their bots. The sniper who stood behind a tree today would almost certainly hide standing behind a different tree the next time he played. The variability made play more challenging—until, in no more than a few iterations, the gamer learned to study all the trunks at the forest’s edge.
The bot ostentatiously wheezing at Travis’s feet had lain prone behind a fallen, rotting log. Better, but still hiding behind a tree trunk. Travis looked around. This sniper could as easily lurk behind that low stacked-stone fence or down in that meandering streambed or—well, that was the point. That the gamer not be able to anticipate. A trained AI—that’s what would make this virt a moneymaker. And Travis was here to give the training.
“You’re too easy to spot among the trees,” Travis told the enemy. “The log isn’t different enough. Mix it up more. Remember that.”
With one last flamboyant shudder, the bot died. Its last gasp did not sound much like, “Thank you.”
And Travis, in the seconds before the dead bot dissolved into a puff of greasy smoke, didn’t feel much like Zorro.
I’m getting the hang of this virt, Travis decided. He was deep in the woods, well on his way to his objective, a bevy of dead enemies marking his passage. Shot, grenaded, knifed…
Of course he had died many times, too, learning to get this far.
He was running low on ammo, and he went through the pockets of the soldier dying at his feet. Travis found three ammo clips, half a dozen grenades, and a pair of binocs.
Stealing from the dying hardly felt heroic. Did the Scarlet Pimpernel ever do such a thing? Odysseus? Batman? It’s not real, Travis reminded himself. And that he would have waited for it to die, if the game software didn’t remove the body so soon after. It’s not real.
In some still, small recess of Travis’s mind, Batman rebuked, “Neither am I.”
Travis lay flat on the rough ground, binocs in hand, peering out from under a dense thicket. An enemy outpost blocked the obvious routes forward. He could try to sneak past by dark of night, but they would expect that. And the sentry he had garroted had had night-vision equipment. Others would, too.
Dark of night: When would that be? He couldn’t remember the apparent time of day he had begun playing. For that matter, he didn’t remember whether it was the same every game.
Hmm. How many times had he started over? Curious. Travis couldn’t say. Still, he couldn’t have been in the virt all that long. He’d had only a modest lunch and he wasn’t hungry.
He glanced at his virtual wrist and found his virtual watch shattered again. He shrugged. When next he died and came back, he would take better care of the chronometer.