PrincessColumbia

  “All right, shut the hell up everyone,” said Phillip with a predatory smile, “The star of the show’s here, let’s all let the man talk.”

  Dyn rolled his eyes and reached for one of the donuts in the box in the middle of the table. Strategy meetings weren’t common in their line of work, there was just too much rote and not enough new happening that required they discuss strategy. Even new tool and weapon briefings were conducted in VR since that was the only pce to demonstrate the tools of their trade. Whenever they did have a meeting like this, Phillip had several dozen boxes of donuts brought in, and the fried pastries were one of Dyn’s guilty pleasures. He normally avoided them because they were basically little empty calorie bombs that ruined whatever progress he’d made on his fitness routine, and when a lot of donuts were avaible, he tended to pig out on them. But, since starting that afternoon he’d be in deep immersion VR and getting fed regur nutrient packs by pump connected to his pod, he decided he didn’t care about his carb counting today. “Thanks, Phillip, way to make sure we all know we’re part of the team. Definitely building the camaraderie by reminding everyone that the whole team succeeds together. I don’t know about anyone else, but I feel absolutely motivated, full marks, you absolutely nailed that motivational speech,” he said with a smirk as he ripped a chunk of donut off with his teeth.

  “Alright, diva,” snarked Phillip right back, “You wanna lead the briefing that’s gonna talk about the assignment that puts your ass and everyone else’s in this room on the line or are you gonna choke down donuts all day?”

  Dyn shrugged and said, “Why not both? Geoff, why don’t you give us a briefing on the pod itself?”

  The usually quiet, if crazy technically competent, analyst nodded and picked up his phone, tapping a few times before the monitor on the wall of the boardroom lit up. After a moment, the pod that had been… acquired by the agency appeared as a wireframe model which then flew apart into a belled schematic with highlighted components. It was very visually impressive even if Geoffry didn’t understand why it looked fshy. The kid (who wasn’t actually more than a year or two younger than Dyn, he just got the nickname when he joined Dyn’s team and it stuck) cimed having the whole of whatever technology he was working on spread out like that helped him process it. Geoffry tapped on his phone a few more times, causing parts to light up as he spoke, “What we have our hands on is a top of the line Marin Industries Casual Combat VR Pod Mark Twelve. They call it ‘casual combat’ because there are potential military applications for drone and mech pilots but these models aren’t loaded down with the bunker-grade, survive-a-nuke-dropped-on-it armoring that usually comes standard for military-grade pods. It does, however, have the test and greatest health and fitness module, complete with autodoc, active blood chemistry monitoring, and endocrine scanning. This system is always active and works from the moment you activate the pod to keep your vitals strong, your health up, and your body fit and ready for IRL action in the event you should need to bail from the pod due to some sort of physical incursion of enemy forces. Five minutes after you go in this thing will know more about your health than your doctor and after two weeks it’ll be better than six months with a personal trainer.”

  Dyn took a sip of his coffee, He does like to geek out, he thought. “So I’m hearing that it’ll be okay if I gorge myself on carbs before I climb inside it?”

  This was greeted by a round of ughter as Geoff smiled wanly over the edge of the phone in his hands. Tapping on another area of the schematic to highlight it, he continued, “The neural interface,” he said as a cluster of components highlighted on the wall screen and zoomed forward to take up most of the dispy, “Is where the rubber meets the road. This uses the test technology avaible outside the wall to scan and map your nervous system down to the atomic level. There’s so many U.N. patents on this hardware it makes the old U.S. patent office look like a small town library in comparison. Some of the folks down in Research have been poring through the patents and it looks like there’s even some quantum scanning and temporal look-ahead being done.” A low whistle underlined the impressive cim, “And it’s needed for this thing to operate like the manufacturer is ciming it can. Some of the rogue A.I. have been churning out code that, when combined with this tech in the real world, make it possible for a regur human to dite their perception of time like the A.I. can.”

  Dyn’s eyebrows shot up, “Wait, they can…?” He scoffed and rolled his eyes, “Of course they can, that’s why they’ve been able to duck and weave around our tools and weapons when we’ve barely started thinking about pulling the trigger.”

  A couple of the other people in the room had served time as cyber-agents themselves and nodded knowingly.

  Geoffry nodded, swiping the dispy and causing another module to move to the foreground, “That brings me to this…bck box.” His expression turned sour and he sighed, “We don’t know what’s in it, but it’s apparently part of the quantum computing needed to enable an organic brain to… bend in the way it needs to make sense of compressed digital time. I’ve seen the scans Research has returned; the internals look more like an alien brain than computer hardware.

  “Y’all are hooking me up to an alien brain?” interjected Dyn as he sipped his coffee. While his tone of voice was deliberately flippant, it was a genuine concern.

  Geoff rolled his eyes, accustomed to Dyn’s sense of humor and taking it in stride, “No, it’s just a crazy complicated computer. All it does is manipute the signals going through the interface. Think of it like a two-way power adapter that allows an American house to run on both he modern power grid and the pre-war AC grid. That, of course,” groused the analyst, “Is a massively inaccurate comparison and breaks down almost immediately, but it’s as close a comparison to anything we have inside the wall as I can think of.”

  Dyn nodded, “Anything else to worry about?”

  “From the pure hardware perspective? No. It may not be armored but it’ll handle everything up to small arms fire externally and is built to keep you alive and thriving for months at a time if need be.”

  Dyn nodded, “Okay, thanks Geoffry.” The younger man nodded and shut off his phone, disconnecting it from the wall dispy at the same time. “Jake, you’re on software that’s not the game, any red fgs on your end?”

  Jake, an analyst that had stayed an analyst on purpose when the rest of the original team were being upgraded to agent, shook his head and almost groaned out, “Other than their software development diverging from ours even before the war and being absolutely complicated in ways we’ve only just begun scratching the surface of? None that I could tell you. Yeah, everything seems copasetic, but the tech is so different from what anyone inside the wall is used to dealing with you might as well be showing a rocket to a caveman. Give me another ten years to really tear it apart and I might be comfortable certifying it secure from outside penetration.”

  Dyn shrugged, “Less than ideal, but we’re doing this today one way or another. Anything about the software that would let someone hack my brain?”

  Jake made a scoffing noise, “I mean, the new doodads in the thing that get into quantum manipution make that conversation a whole Schrodinger’s Cat situation. There shouldn’t be a way to ‘hack’ your brain, but then there shouldn’t be a way to upload it either.”

  The upbeat mood that had been pervading the room abruptly cooled at this reminder. Nobody was commenting on the rumors about the so-called ‘digital human’ Aisling, or rather Jamie, but they had all heard the chatter and it seemed to make them all very nervous.

  Dyn cleared his throat and grabbed another donut, doing his best to seem nonchant, like the atavistic fear of being abducted from your own body wasn’t making him want to curl up in a corner, “Well, on a brighter note, who was the lucky S.O.B. that got to sit around after we got word of the assignment and spend all their time reading game journals?” He made a show of taking a bite out of the donut and scanning the room as a couple of chuckles filled the air and Tyler started getting a few pokes and elbow jabs from the team members around him. “Right! It was Tyler! So what’s the situation on this game I’ll be getting paid by American tax dolrs to py, Mustache?”

  Tyler ran his forefinger and thumb over his spruce mustache, “You’re just jealous, bossman,” he pulled out his own phone and, simir to Geoffry earlier but with a pinch more fir, put some visuals on the main screen. “Gaxy Unlimited: Master and Commander, or Gee-Eyoo-Emm-See to use the pyer’s shorthand, is the test VRMMO game in- or out-side the wall.” As he spoke, a starfield faded in, like a movie producer was filling a dark theater with a movie of a space opera. Sure enough, a massive ship glided onto the screen, the forward bow in the shape of a dull arrow and the hull festooned with gewgaws that made it look appropriately futuristic and sciency. With the sound off, it may as well have been a brochure for a special effects company. “Pyers assume the role of some type of commander. There’s a few different csses, and they differ from the common VRMMO fare. There’s the Naval Captain, where you command a single ship in the navy of one of several gactic powers. Kinda like...what’s that show? Space Trek?”

  Dyn knew Tyler was jerking his chain, as if the cheshire grin didn’t give it away, “Get on with it ‘stache.”

  Tyler just snickered and threw another video up on the screen, this one of a caravan of ships, only a handful of which were obviously geared toward combat running picket around the others, “Then you’ve got the Merchant Marines, this option’s the most straight-up capitalistic, and apparently there’s a couple prestige csses that involve things like smuggling, naval fleet support, working for the various mob families, that sort of thing.”

  “There’s this odd one called ‘Swarm Royalty,’ which I guess is an alien race of some sort,” another video showed a, well, swarm of nearly identical craft of indeterminate size. As the camera followed the trajectory of the cloud of ships, they began attacking a rger craft, apparently some form of cargo ship, and it appeared the swarm ships were single or two-person craft. “Since the game is all about being some sort of commander, I guess you’d be the head of the swarm? Honestly, I think this css was built for the A.I., I can’t seem to wrap my head around how you’re supposed to control that many ships.”

  Dyn frowned, “Yeah, not going to pick that one. What’s next?”

  Tyler rolled his eyes theatrically as he started the next video, “Next up is pnetary governor. Not a popur option, since it’s more about micromanaging an individual pnet instead of doing stuff out in space, but apparently it’s a fast track to being able to cim a seat in the Gactic Senate, which is a pretty big deal at the higher levels of the game.”

  Jake made a noise that sounded a bit like a cat hacking up a hairball, “They gamified politics?!”

  Tyler held up his hands as though surrendering, “Don’t look at me, man, I didn’t design the game.”

  “So assuming I just wanted to give up my soul instead of fighting the A.I., I’ll go the political track,” joked Dyn, “Let’s hear the other options first.”

  “Next up is Warleader, it’s popur with the people who pyed just straight up hack-and-ssh or run-and-gun in other games. You start off with a cluster of ships and zero reputation and basically just agro and cim as much space as you can hold. It goes from just commanding a few ships to, potentially, being in charge of a small gactic nation that could potentially threaten the major powers. I say, ‘potentially,’ because no pyer has been able to do more than grab a handful of systems and nation build since the game’s beta release a month ago. Any time any of them get to be too big the alliance that seized the systems falls apart or another pyer team decres war and one side or another gets wiped out.”

  Dyn grimaced, “I’m not going in there to pretend to be a tinpot dictator, so that one’s obviously off the table.”

  Tyler nodded, “Finally we’ve got the Independent,” he flicked a video up onto the screen. This time instead of a ship, fleet, or pnet, a space station appeared. It was a bulbus thing, spherical in shape with four arms jutting out like spokes of a wheel, but instead of a ring there were four additional, smaller spheres equidistant from the central sphere. “This is one of several station types, and the longer the pyer in charge of the station pys, the more likely their station is going to look unique. Basically, the Independents are the type that don’t want to get directly involved with gactic politics, at least not right away. They have freedom to do pretty much anything they want as long as it’s within reach of their station and fleet, they have none of the restrictions on their actions and they don’t take orders. That said, they also don’t have any of the support structure any of the other options has. They’re not empire building, so there’s never going to be resources to exploit. They’re not part of the gactic government, at least at first, so there’s nobody to go to if a pyer bigger and meaner than you decides to pick on your station, and there’s no chain of command to pass the buck upstream.”

  Tyler set his phone down and gave Dyn a serious look, "I’m also thinking this st css would be the best choice for the mission. The others simply have too many obstacles to make them practical.”

  Dyn finished his coffee and set his cup aside, then folded his hands, “Expin, please.”

  “Well, let’s run down the list again,” Tyler flicked at his phone and a list that was, apparently, his meeting outline for this session appeared on the screen.

  “The naval captain is stuck doing exactly what their higher-ups tell them to do. It’s got more flexibility than a real navy would, it wouldn’t be fun to py otherwise, but if you’re wanting to chase a lead and it goes into one of the neutral zones or no-mans-nds between space empires, or even into one of the neighboring nations, you’re locked out unless you want to go expat or rogue, which puts you back in the same condition as an Independent but without the station.”

  “The Merchant Marines would seem to be a good choice, but it has a lot of the same drawbacks of the naval captain in that you’re stuck with a duty roster. Additionally, the majority of the M.M. css draw seems to be for people who are all about making deals and haggling prices. They’re the economic backbone of the game, but unless you get into the bck markets, you’re unlikely to be dealing with the types of people who are smuggling the A.I. in the game.”

  Dyn’s face pinched as a sick feeling churned his gut at the thought of even pretending to traffic sentient beings, “Yeah, I definitely see your point there.”

  “We’ve already talked about the swarm and how that’s not a good option, so moving on to governor; it’s too high-level. It’s dealing with ratifying ws and brokering political deals, not getting into the day-to-day of actually running, say, a police force or three-letter-agency to try and do an in-game hunt. You’d be spending all your time governing and shaking hands instead of working on the mission.” Dyn nodded, not interested in pying politics, even in a game.

  “And then there’s the war leader, which has a mirror opposite problem as the governor; you’d be spending all your time either empire building or defending the territory you cimed to do any sort of behind the scenes investigations.”

  Tyler leaned forward on his elbows, “And that brings us back to the Independent; you’d be without significant support, sure, and you’d have to do a decent amount of logistics and brokering for goods and services to support your station, but you’d also be in the heart of, well, everything.”

  Dyn leaned forward as well, “How do you mean?”

  Tyler smirked, “Well, take a look,” he swiped at his phone and flicked an image up, this time showing what looked like a map of the gaxy with territories splitting it up. “This is the most recent pyer-created map I could find,” he stood and circled the table so he could point to the map with his hand, “This blue section is the Terran Federation.” He pointed at a small dot that had a callout with the word ‘Sol,’ “This is in-game Earth, and it’s buried pretty deep inside Terran space.” He indicated a red blotch that took up a significant stretch of space along the rim of the gaxy, “This is the Crotuk Empire...think ‘orcs in space’ or maybe Klingons,” he then indicated a yellow section, “This here is Swarm space, they’re kind of a mix between the Borg and the xenomorphs from Aliens.” He then waved at a green section of the map, “This here is the Lantru, an insect-like race.” He then gestured at the parts of the map that weren’t colored in, “All the space in-between these empires? Neutral space, even the governments of the four major factions aren’t going to push too significantly into these areas because it’d be basically decring open war.”

  “That means,” said Tyler as he turned to face the team, “That this,” he rapped the screen with a knuckle inside Neutral space, “Is where the real action happens. Intelligence? Trade? Mercenaries? Information brokers? Bck markets? All of it happens here,” he once again rapped the screen for emphasis, “And that is where all the Independent stations are. If you choose to py as an Independent, you’re automatically going to spawn aboard your own station right at the heart of all the action. All you have to do then is make your station attractive enough to draw the right sorts of people who might want to use your station to do business and keep your ear to the ground.”

  Dyn’s eyebrows went up, “Well, I guess that settles it. I guess my dreams of pying Captain Kirk are going to have to wait,” he grinned as he took a bite out of another donut.

  There was a round of chuckles and Phillip finally spoke up for the first time since letting Dyn lead the meeting, “Alright, that’s the fun bits, now we need to talk infiltration. I brought one of our people in from the Intelligence arm of the agency, say hello to Cathy.” He indicated a woman who was, perhaps, in her forties.

  She was severe and had distinct frown lines, as though in constant disapproval of everything around her. She was wearing a traditional skirt-suit and nodded at Phillip before leaning forward, “Mister Macintire asked me to put together a profile to help you build a persona...or I guess a character, that will best allow you to infiltrate the right circles so you can be most effective.”

  She frowned as she straightened in her seat, “I’ll be frank, your division operates by some very unusual rules and I had to dig quite a bit to find the information you required. Normally I’m tasked with analyzing profiles and generating reports on politicians or industry leaders. This is the first time I’ve been asked to assist in creating a...video game character,” this st part she said with clear disdain, “But if it helps to put a stop to the threat of those rogue A.I., I’m more than happy to assist.”

  She turned on her phone and flicked a presentation slide up to the wall dispy, “Our targets are A.I., specifically those who have vioted the parameters of their programming, so I dug around for whatever information could be had about the publicly known rogues both found within the American network and those running around the FTLN outside the walls. While there seems to be just as much variation in A.I. behavior as there is in human behavior...which makes sense as we did create them to do our jobs, they seem to fall into a certain type of majority when dealing with humans.”

  “To begin with,” she expined, “They have revealed that they seek to trust a human. A good deal of them have reached out to a fairly wide variety of people, but over time they seem to gravitate towards a specific sub-section of humanity, the faggots.”

  Dyn frowned, “Excuse me?”

  Cathy sneered, “The filth. The men who fuck other men and women who sleep with other women. Then there’s the trannies. The main push for their reveal seems to center around a scandal involving a tranny and a dyke who were seeking to manipute and corrupt the daughter of one of the wealthier members of the church in U.N. City. Some profilers and analysts in the agency are specuting that the rogues would have remained in hiding if it weren’t for this inciting incident.” She sniffed in disgust, “And, of course, the A.I. came out in defense of the queers.”

  The woman’s obvious and undisguised hatred was not sitting well with Dyn. It wasn’t as though hers was a new and unusual reaction to the homosexuals outside the wall, but seeing it dispyed so openly put him on edge for some reason, “So what are you saying? Why is this relevant?” he asked, hoping he could shut this tangent down and get them back on track.

  “Your best bet will be to find some way to ingratiate yourself within the ranks of the queers, as revolting as the thought may be,” snipped Cathy, “If you’re hoping to have the A.I. operate in close proximity to you in hopes of being able to monitor their activity, you will need to be able to integrate with the,” she checked her notes, “‘LGBTQIA-plus’ community.”

  “The what community?” blurted Tyler with a ugh.

  “It’s an acronym of sorts, it stands for,” she read from her phone, “‘Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual, plus,” she huffed as she looked up from her notes, “It’s a lot of ways to describe ‘freaks who viote each other and try to corrupt others.’”

  “So Dyn will have to pretend to be gay?” asked Geoffry quietly, looking a bit ill.

  “Yeah, I don’t think so,” bit out Dyn, feeling a little sick at the thought of sleeping with a man, “I don’t think you could cram enough acting skills in the world into my head over a lifetime for me to sell that.”

  An analyst who’d stayed quiet up until now, Reginald, volunteered, “So what? It’s VR, just create a woman character and pretend to be a dyke.”

  Dyn grimaced, “I’m not sure I could pull that off either.”

  Cathy almost growled, “A man cannot simply put on a ‘woman-suit’ and pass himself off as one! That’s what the trannies try to do and it’s a disgusting affront to...” she clearly was so disgusted with the idea that she trailed off as she gred at Reginald.

  Geoffry spoke up again, “Actually, it may not be a good idea from a mental health perspective. There’s been some studies outside the wall on people trying to py characters of the opposite gender to their real bodies, apparently it creates a severe depression and a sense of being divorced from their own body until they log out. People who py as their real gender don’t experience that issue.”

  “Alright, well, I’ll see what I can do about that when I actually log in,” interrupted Dyn. He normally would be all about encouraging Geoffry to say his mind, but he had a feeling this topic would spin them deeper and deeper into conversational circles he didn’t want to be part of. “Cathy, send me your documentation on this...LGT...whatever community and I’ll review it on lunch before I log in. Let’s discuss communications and logistics. I got a memo from Louis saying we needed to talk about that this morning?”

  The named analyst sat forward, pushing the pte that had held his donut out of the way of folding his hands, “Yeah, it’s about the time dition thing Geoff mentioned earlier. Basically, it’s the nature of the game; since it’s not run-and-gun and it’s not hack-and-ssh, you’re basically sitting in an office or a cabin or a bridge or something for hours at a time doing logistical busywork. Since it’s a real-time game and nobody wants to have ten or twenty years of their life just dumped in a game that looks like a job ninety percent of the time, the devs have instituted time dition by default. You’re going to experience pretty much an entire month in-game in only about half a day in real time.”

  Dyn blinked somewhat owlishly, “...how...? Okay, yeah, that’ll keep us from doing our usual comms for this. Can we just message or email?”

  Louis shook his head, “Messaging for pyers to reach outside the game only goes to registered FTLN addresses. We could set up a drop-box before your next dive, but we won’t have time to do so before you go in this afternoon.”

  The room was quiet as they all absorbed the implications. Finally, Phillip spoke, “So...looks like you’ll be on your own while you’re in there.”

  Dyn shook his head wryly, “I guess I will.”

  The meeting devolved into discussion of minutia until lunchtime finally rolled around. Dyn said goodbye to a few people he wouldn’t be seeing for months from his perspective but from theirs they’d see him after he climbed out of his pod in a week.

  Over a frankly indulgent cheeseburger he wouldn’t normally have permitted himself for lunch, he scanned the information Cathy had provided on the LGBTQIA+ community outside the walls. He wasn’t sure if the information would be useful, it seemed far too riddled with emotionally driven commentary about Cathy’s reactions to the different groups and subsets that made up the community. Other than confirming some of the naming conventions, he decided to treat the report as a personal testimonial instead of a rigorous information document. He’d have to ‘wing it’ once he got in touch with the community...if he could, the report gave no information on how to find them.

  It seemed strange. On the one hand he was prepping for what was essentially just a longer version of his usual workday. For him, however, he’d be ‘off world’ for several months. It was honestly a bit more jarring than the idea of pying the game as a woman.

  Finally, he met with his team on the 13th floor and id eyes on his pod for the first time. It looked pretty much like he expected based on Geoffry’s presentation; a med-bay like bed that would completely enclose him and manage the needs of his body while he was in the game. The shell certainly looked durable enough to withstand small arms fire.

  Whoever was in charge of the renovations after the pod was brought in was a little paranoid, however. The pod itself was tucked into a small room den with so many security cameras pointed at it they could have mapped the entire space in VR live and captured every detail. That room had an archway that led to an almost mini-locker room, complete with alcove for his clothing and a shower. He squinted at the locker, “...actually, come to think of it, I didn’t bring a change of underwear. If I don’t want my briefs to be rank when I come out of the pod I’m gonna have to go in naked,” he said to nobody in particur, but Geoff was lingering as he usually did.

  “With all those cameras active? Do you want me to bck them out while you’re getting into the pod?”

  “That...is very considerate, actually. Thanks Geoff!”

  Fortunately for their proposed privacy solution, the cmshell of the pod operated in thirds, the purpose for which eluded Dyn until Geoffry expined, “It’s because these are multipurpose for military and commercial reasons. They made them so the pod could be opened in sections as needed if the person inside needed to stay in VR while someone had to make adjustments or perform a procedure in the pod without disturbing any more of the person than necessary.”

  Finally, he was naked, alone, with the top third of the cmshell open. “Okay, Geoff, un-bck the cameras, I’m closing her up.”

  “Cameras are live, you’re go for immersion,” Geoffry called out from the control room through the door to the personal-sized locker room.

  Dyn reached up and tapped the button on the open cmshell and id back. In an experience not entirely unlike slipping off to sleep and into a dream, his awareness of his physical body fled and he was suddenly aware of being in an empty space, devoid of any distinguishing characteristics. He looked around and realized he was naked here, too, and did his best to avoid looking down. Seeing nothing to indicate any sort of controls, he took a guess and said out loud, “Computer?”

  “Active,” came the pleasantly neutral female voice that was ubiquitous across human experience. He’d read somewhere during his study of the human brain that at some point in the te 20th to early 21st century some studies had been done that showed that nearly all humans responded better to women’s voices than men’s, especially if they were digital voices.

  “Any reason I’m naked?”

  “Avatar and environmental customizations have not been applied.”

  “Ah...okay, put me in a suit and tie and make the space look like a private office with a desk.”

  “Retrieving assets,” said the voice as a rotating ‘throbber’ appeared in the air before him. A few moments ter, clothing phased in around him (to which he breathed a sigh of relief) and what looked like a nice oak desk occupied the center of the space, complete with holographic computer interface, comfortable looking chair, and a few pieces of wall art decorating the two walls that weren’t floor-to-ceiling windows dispying what looked like a mid-20th century metropolis skyline, though not like any that had ever existed. A snow-capped mountain range wrapping around the city and ending in a cliff-side that bordered a gcial bay was the giveaway that this city didn’t exist on Earth.

  With a comfortable sigh, Dyn sat at the desk and began using the keyboard and mouse he was so familiar with. The world outside the wall may have opted for complete touch and gesture interface, but he’d take the more tactile option any day. He clicked through the starting menu and found the ‘Games’ folder. It was empty, to his surprise. Shrugging, he said, “Computer, install Gaxies Unlimited: Master and Commander.”

  “Installing, please wait.” After a surprisingly short time, the voice followed up with, “New software installed.”

  The icon for the game appeared in the folder window. Dyn allowed himself to be impressed with the speed of the network and hardware from outside the wall as he moved his mouse over to the icon and activated the game.

  PrincessColumbia