Weapons were trained across the buffer zone, making it seem as if he stood directly in the line of fire. He adjusted the reality-mode setting on his Neural Interface. There was such a thing as too much realism, after all.
The newscast he was playing on his NIF turned from a real-life experience into a remote vid, but his fast-beating heart didn't slow. Ten months ago, things had been fine. And then a single incident involving a Turkish tourist attacked by street-toughs in Greece had triggered a series of ever-increasing violence.
Until it came to this. Athens would not tolerate the Turkish attack on the Republic of Cyprus. It was all too likely that they'd answer with a nuclear strike against Ankara. In which case Iraq would retaliate, which would cause the European Union to enter the war, which would draw the African League in. .
Basil cut that thought off before he could brood himself into a panic attack.
He activated his NIF's comm app and pinged his friend Daphne. Almost immediately, her pale face appeared before his inner eye.
"Hi Basil. I take it you've watched the news?"
"So I have. I think I'll go on a long vacation, say-to Antarctica, or somewhere equally far away. So should you."
She brushed a lock out of her eyes with unsteady hands. "Hmm. Actually, I've got a different idea. Mind if I visit you in person to discuss it?"
Basil felt his eyebrows rise. In all the years of their online friendship she had never suggested such a thing. "You want to come all the way to Cyprus just to meet me?"
She nodded. "I want to talk in private, where nobody can hack in and listen."
Had she still not forgiven him for his little demonstration a few months back? "Hey, just because I hacked into your Neural Interface that doesn't mean everybody can."
"It proved to me that my NIF isn't as secure as I thought. I'm not going to take any chances. So can I visit you, or not?"
Basil agreed, and they broke the connection.
He took a look around the room-and went into a cleaning frenzy. When the doorbell rang two hours later his apartment looked almost presentable. He picked up a sock he had overlooked and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he opened the door, and Daphne swept past him into the apartment.
She had an even more impressive presence in person than on the cloud. Her face wasn't exactly beautiful, and her curves weren't ample enough to suit current fashion. But she radiated an intense-and infectious-energy. Just watching her pace the length of his living room eased his exhaustion from that hurried housecleaning feat.
She turned and fixed him with a glower. "We've got to do something about this war."
He stared at her. "Do something? We? What could we do? I'm a cloud security expert, not a peacemaker. And you're an online game designer, for God's sake. What exactly do you think the two of us could accomplish that all the powerful politicians can't?"
Her glower grew darker, but all she said was, "Well, we won't know until we try, will we?" She plunked herself down on his sofa. "I've got an idea."
****
Around midnight three days later, Basil withdrew from a false persona he'd set up in the cloud environment the Neural Interfaces around the world connected to. This was the last fake user in a trail of other false identities, designed to keep people from tracing his activities back to him. If they went through with Daphne's crazy plan, he'd need those protections.
Daphne wanted him to hack into the NIFs of every powerful politician and military leader in Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey, and install an online war game she and her co-workers at Shooting Star Games Ltd. had worked on over the last few months. The idea was to trap all the major players in the game, and have them start their war in the virtual world instead of the real one.
"Are you sure your war game will feel like the real thing to our victims?" he asked.
"I'm sure." Daphne sat in the corner of the sofa, working on the game design. "The app was developed by Shooting Star, after all. We're good at realistic games."
"I know," he said. He had played those games himself. A NIF game interacted directly with the user's brain. If the game was detailed enough, the experience was indistinguishable from reality. And Shooting Star was justly famous for its realistic war games. "But that's for settings outside the user's real-life experience. What we're trying to do is different. How can you convince people that they're in the real world when you don't know a thing about their actual surroundings?"
"But I do know everything about their current location. Every single one of our targets has retreated to their respective emergency bunkers. And I've got experience recordings for those bunkers."
"Somebody actually recorded their stay in a high security bunker and made it available to you?" Basil shook his head.
She gave him a forced smile. "There's a lot of money in the game industry, and the people who maintain those bunkers don't earn all that much. So yes, Shooting Star has been able to acquire top-security information on most of those bunkers world-wide.
"You didn't hear that from me, of course," she added as an afterthought.
"Of course," he echoed, still chewing on that unexpected piece of information.
The more he thought about it, the more feasible this insane plan seemed. He'd even found an outdated version of the Greek NIF security protocol, buried under terabytes of virtual trash at an obscure site that nobody claimed ownership to.
Based on what he'd been able to learn from that protocol, he thought he could see a flaw that he might be able to exploit-a flaw that any protocol evolved from that design was likely to share. And where there was a flaw, Basil was positive he could break in. If he dared.
Part of him wished that the plan was completely impossible. He did not sleep well that night.
He was bleary-eyed and depressed when Daphne knocked on the bedroom door the next morning.
"Have you watched the news?" she demanded.
"And a good morning to you, too," he said. "No, I've just woken up. What happened?"
Her cheekbones stood out on her pale face, making her look haggard. Basil wasn't sure she'd even registered his dig.
"Turkey is bringing in additional troops from the mainland, and Greece has no units close enough to match them. International analysts agree that the Turks will overrun the south within the week. If that happens, Greece will push the Button." Her eyes bore into his. "We've got to act, now."
Basil leaned back and pulled his pony tail with suddenly damp hands. His heart vibrated like a guitar string.
"Daphne, I'm just an ordinary guy," he said. "I've always had this nerdy tendency not to jump into adventures. You need a hero for this, not someone like me."
Daphne's shoulders slumped. "I know what you mean. I've always been a mousy little geek myself. But. . somebody has to do something, or we might literally face the end of the world!" The last few words came out as a squeak.
Basil stared at her. Melodramatic as that statement sounded, she was right. But he couldn't be the one to save the world. That kind of thing didn't happen to people like him.
Daphne returned his gaze imploringly, lips trembling.
Basil averted his eyes and exhaled. "Let's have some coffee, and I'll watch the news."
"You're not mousy," he added as an afterthought.
That earned him a watery smile.