Soda Pop Soldier

It sucks to lose.

Kiwi’s avatar, large and hulking, shirt off and showing curling tribal tats, leans against the bar talking to JollyBoy, an intel specialist, and Fever, a great medic who’s managed to revive me on the battlefield more than a few times, including one time I swore I was really down for the count. I double-click them and bring up all three of their feeds. Kiwi looks even more frightening in real life than his avatar. Huge, hulking, tattoo overdose, a leering lecherous grin, almost drooling into the monitor. His eyes are the only feature that tell you he’s a friend and not foe. His eyes say, I’m kind; you can trust me, mate.

“Perfect, Perfect, PerfectQuestion. Did ya make it back to the rally, mate?” he asks me.

“Cheers, Kiwi. It was touch and go, lost a lot of grunts. But, yeah, we got picked up at the rice paddies just as WonderSoft started dropping their artillery all over us.”

“We lost three slicks at the LZ,” JollyBoy announces happily. The joker he is never fades, even when he’s delivering the worst of news. Losing three Albatrosses made me glad I was on one of the slicks that got out of there. What a cheap way to get it. It’s one thing to be out there fighting, making a bad choice, getting caught in the cross fire, whatever, and losing your day’s winnings and bonuses. But catching a slick and feeling safe as you hear the turbines spool up and thinking you’ve just escaped one bad day of gaming and that you’re gonna get paid and make it to the next fight only to have it explode a moment later—well, that’s another thing. A bad thing.

“Any players?” asks Fever. Fever cares little about the fighting. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen him running around with his weapon out. He only carries his med packs, boosts, and revival pads. He cares more about us than the battles.

“Yeah,” JollyBoy says with a smirk. “ShogunSmile and WarChild …”

“These laughin’ newboys with their haiku tags. Serves ’em …” Kiwi’s drunk, but just drunk enough to catch himself at the beginning of a lecture on tag choice. His discipline isn’t long for this world.

“What’re you listening to, PerfectQuestion?” asks Fever, catching the music in my background.

“Lemme see … ‘Vietnam’ by this reggae guy, Jimmy Cliff.”

“Sounds good. … feed me.”

“Me too,” says Kiwi. I patch them into my music, inviting JollyBoy also.

“No thanks, PerfectQuestioney. The Harlequin likes his industrial trance calliope mixes.”

JollyBoy is weird.

We play music for a while and watch funny clips from the day’s battle, usually something we or our grunts did that was dumb. We talk about what went wrong and what we should have done, all the while each choosing a song, not realizing we’re saying something about ourselves, the day, and maybe life. Finally Kiwi plays “Waltzing Matilda,” mumbles something about the long ride to the Wonky Boomerang and logs off without further good-byes. JollyBoy has long since faded into other conversations. Fever smiles and says, “Keep your head down, Perfect,” and is gone. I scan the cantina for RiotGuurl.

Why?

Because it was her first battle as a professional. That entitles her entrance into the bunker. I tell my empty apartment it wasn’t her fault that we lost and put on “Black Metallic” by Catherine Wheel. Another drink and I force myself to think about Sancerré and a relationship that’s coming apart at the seams. But my guitar-driven thoughts keep returning to RiotGuurl.

Who is she?

Where is she?

And why do I care?

Chapter 3

At twenty to midnight I wake, still sitting, still holding the remnants of a watery glass of amber scotch on my stomach.

This is my life. Digital death, destruction, and some computerized mayhem by day, long lonely nights with too much scotch and too little of the woman I loved.

Love? Loved?

Love.

Too much of some, and too little of something else.

“Do I love what I do?” I ask myself as I throw on my trench, a vintage leather piece purchased as a reward after promotion to professional, and hit the streets for the short walk to Madison Square Garden. I guess I do, otherwise why else be out on a dark winter night, dirty green glowing frost clinging to the sidewalks, just to see the fruits of my defeat?

Just before midnight, across the street from where I stand in the shadows, the giant PrismBoard goes dark. It had been showing a blond construction worker slaving away in a hot suit setting up a thousand reflector assemblies. Slowly, dawn’s first rays hit the fragile plantlike assemblies, which then burst into life like so many exploding crystals. Around the construction worker, Mars begins to turn green as plants grow, cities rise, and the construction worker begins to age into a handsome silver fox. His hot suit is suddenly gone and now his tanned skin shows through a brilliant white cotton shirt and khaki trousers as an equally beautiful little girl, presumably his granddaughter, grasps his hand and holds up a cola. He smiles and drinks. Then the ColaCorp logo emerges.

The ColaCorp ad runs two or three more times while I wait and then, at just the moment the Martian colonist begins to age for the fourth time, the PrismBoard goes dark. Now, only the blue lights of the tall towers that disappear into the cloud cover below Upper New York remain. Upper New York blocks out the night sky. Strange, eerie lights move back and forth up there, above the cloud bottoms. The dark feels more sinister as those faraway lights provide the only illumination down here in the dark remains of a mostly forgotten old New York.

I feel that preconcert moment before the main act comes on. When it’s dark and you feel like something important is about to happen. Or at least you did, when you were young and a band seemed like it might be something more than it was.

The WonderSoft logo appears on the PrismBoard as French horns, mournful, tiresome, noble nonetheless, begin to serenade the nearby streets with the coming of WonderSoft’s endless barrage of SoftLife products. In front of me, in the middle of the street, a bum in silhouette passes by while techno-Gregorian chants promise both of us hope in a bubble.

What does that bum want from life? Glory days remembered, youth retained, a friend long gone, never returning, suddenly appearing. WonderSoft wants him to have the latest SoftEye. He passes on, oblivious to the expensive marketing of WonderSoft’s next gen product, my defeat, their victory.

“Two sides of the same coin,” says a voice from the shadows behind me. I turn and see a tall and very thin man. Shadows abound all around us as the light from the PrismBoard shifts, and for a moment all I can see is a long coat, a wide flat hat, and a SoftEye gently pulsing purple in the left eye of the stranger. Then I can see all the images of WonderSoft’s ad playing out across him and the light-turned-bone-white alley he stands in.

“I say, two sides of the same coin, isn’t it?” he repeats. His voice reminds me of some English actor from one of the period piece dramas Sancerré watches only for the outfits, or so I suspect. Like a violin playing Mozart. With malice.

“I don’t follow … ,” I mumble.

“One’s defeat, another’s victory. Your loss, someone’s gain.” Now WonderSoft’s Voice of the Ages begins to sell product above and behind me on the giant shining PrismBoard.

“SOFTLIFE, IT’S NOT JUST A DREAM ANYMORE …”

“Who cares, though? We were tired of the old, give us the new,” continues the thin man from the shifting shadows. “A new liberator has come to save us from the shackles of ColaCorp, or U-Home, or UberVodka, or TarMart, or, yes, even someday, WonderSoft.” Golden light erupts across the street as the PrismBoard gyrates wildly to the exciting new life WonderSoft promises. From the shadows the thin man steps forward and I can see him clearly now as the light display floods his face with a thousand sudden images.

“DREAMS, LIFE, LOVE, SEX, FRIENDS, FAMILY, POWER, SOFTLIFE OFFERS ALL THIS AND … ,” intones WonderSoft’s Voice of the Ages.

“Death to the tyrant, hail the new Caesar!” shouts the thin man above it all and throws his long arms sickeningly wide. In the golden light of the PrismBoard I see that he is not so much a thin man, but more a bony man. A man whose skin is so tightly stretched, it shows all the bones in his face.

A man made of bones.

“Faustus Mercator, commenter on things past, things to come, and …” He laughs. “All things in general, really. Butcher, baker, and of late, kingmaker. At your service.” He removes his hat—doffing it, I think they used to say in old bound books—and makes a slight bow, never once taking his SoftEye off me. The skin of his skull is dry and tight and, as I said, bony. Every ridge, protrusion, and scar is seen beneath the shaved, dark stubble of his bulbous head.

A character. Out here on a night like this. I wonder if he’s just a fan, or even a reporter blogging on the changing of the marquee. I’ve started getting a lot of e-mail for PerfectQuestion, and not all of it can be classified as fan mail. Many times there’s an undercurrent of disgust, rage, or sometimes something worse. For a moment I stare at him contemplating what he’s capable of. Hoping for the best, I shudder and wrap the trench tighter around my body. I don’t have much body fat or warmth to spare. Borderline poverty does that to you. I smile, nicelike, testing him. His response will let me know if I should fight … or flee. His agile build and height, three inches above my six feet makes a good argument for flight. He smiles back, immediately, beamingly.

“Picking up your check tomorrow, I s’pose?” he asks, drawing out the last word.

He knows I’m a professional. Maybe the only people down here at this time of night are the winners and the losers. Since I know who the losers are when I look in the mirror, that must make him one of the winners.

WonderSoft. But which one? BangDead, Unhappy Camper, OneShot, CaptainCarnage, maybe even Enigmatrix. WonderSoft had been recruiting the best for much of the past year. Their national battlefield advertising wins reflected as much.

“SOFTLIFE, A NEW WAY, A NEW HOPE, A NEW TOMORROW …”

“No bonuses I’m afraid, though.” He continues on, his smile a sudden row of large white headstones erupting between thin lips. “At least not with … your present company.”

“Do I know you?” I ask.

I’m not a fighter. I don’t mistake my online capacity for rapacious violence with my real-life code of nonviolence, which isn’t so much a code but more of an excuse for not being the toughest guy in the world and all the problems that comes with. I don’t make that mistake.

“I know a lot of things, PerfectQuestion. A lot of things.” He also knows my online tag. Great, what else does he know?

“Monday morning, after tonight’s match, you’ll show up at Forty-Seventh and Broadway, ColaCorp’s once proud headquarters,” Bony Man continues. “And you’ll be shown to the seventy-fourth-floor meeting room. Checks will be handed out, and poor old RangerSix will discuss what went wrong and how things might get better. In the end you’ll leave and prepare for Tuesday night’s big match in the Eastern Highlands. Forget Sunday night, later today, tonight in fact now that yesterday’s dead and buried. Sunday night’s just small change, just a bunch of brushfire skirmishes to be stamped out. Tuesday’s the real big game. We all know that, PerfectQuestion. Big things are afoot, heavy lifters moving in, all kinds of nasty tanks and antipersonnel platforms. Should be a real—what did your pal Kiwi call it?—a real ‘knife and gun show,’ I believe. But while you’re sitting there, PerfectQuestion, listening to all those really nifty big plans of RangerSix’s, and when you leave that ever so small, I mean tall, building, ask yourself …”

Big pause. He beams, holding his breath. Like the suspense is supposed to kill me.

“Are you happy, PerfectQuestion?”

“What?”

“Are … you … happy, PerfectQuestion? You know, a feeling of joy, optimism, ecstatic belief. Are you happy?”

“All right, I’ll ask myself if I’m happy, OneShot, or Unhappy Camper, or Enigmatrix, or whatever your name is. And if I’m not, what’s it to you?”

“Tsk tsk and pshaw,” says Bony Man.

Someone read a little too much Dickens.

“I’m no such animal, PerfectQuestion. You’re the killer, online. You would know those worthies if you met them in real life. They’re killers, like you, online of course. Not me. I haven’t the skills for such pursuits. I have only the highest respect for people like yourself who can keep track of so much, all the while pointing and shooting, managing the little lifelike dolls you call grunts, dodging the bullets of the enemy, once again, online of course. No, my fingers get all crossed up and, to be honest, they’ve got minds of their own. You wouldn’t believe the things they’ve done, the trouble they’ve gotten me into.” He held up one long spiderlike hand in front of his face. Images from the PrismBoard slither across its length.

“My brain gets so discombobulated with all that hectic killing, online. No, no, I’m made for other pursuits. I have talents better used in the real world. But as for you, young PerfectQuestion, you young golden boy, you young Pericles, this is your day, your battle, and you would easily defeat an amateur like me, online of course. I even wonder how much of a challenge Enigmatrix herself would actually be for you. You’re quite a killer, online of course.” Again he smiles, leaning in at me. I clutch the sawed-off broomstick I always carry in the deep right pocket of my trench. It isn’t much, but it just might have to do.

“Which brings me to my original command, or request, if you prefer. Ask yourself, tomorrow on the seventy-fourth floor: Am I, PerfectQuestion, happy?” His polished patent leather shoes grind roughly on the pavement as he spins away from me, turning to leave. It makes me think of stone crypts being opened. He’s leaving now, still talking talk and leaving.

“Ask yourself, PerfectQuestion,” he throws over his shoulder, “are there meeting rooms higher than the seventy-fourth? Who’s getting the bonuses? Where is Sancerré? Where will she be tonight? And don’t forget to ask yourself the most important question”—he turns at the edge of the shadows deep in the alley, almost enveloped, almost swallowed whole by the darkness that brought him—“Am I happy?” Then he’s gone.

“SOFTLIFE STARTS TODAY, INSIDE YOU.”

Chapter 4

The Sunday Night Game starts and I’m tasked with clearing out a small village of WonderSoft insurgents as the battle lines attempt to coalesce. The insurgents are players who’ve volunteered, by paying their monthly WarWorld Live subscription, to fight for WonderSoft. The insurgents crossed the Song Hua River downstream and have been ambushing ColaCorp units using a small village up in the jungle highlands as a base.

I haven’t lost any troops because I like to play it safe, and all my grunts are fairly leveled up. They don’t make many of the mistakes the basic AI-controlled grunts often do. So we take the village and neutralize five insurgents. I check my bonus pay on all five as soon as WhippySFX, the last WonderSoft insurgent, goes down in a hail of gunfire near the village’s central raised hut. At twenty per, I make a cool hundred. Not everything I need, but every bit helps.

“PerfectQuestion, this is Six; what’s your status?” I switch from my CommandPad to BattleChat and reply.

“We’re finished here, whaddya got for us next?”

There’s a pause. I wonder if the connection’s dropped, or if we’re even being jammed by WonderSoft’s electronic warfare units. Then, “PerfectQuestion,” says RangerSix in his signature matter-of-fact drawl, “I need you to order your unit to link up with ShogunSmile four clicks west of your position. Give him command authority …”

I’ve been fired.

Then, “I need you to log in to OpsDeck for a briefing, Question. We’ve had a superlab opportunity open up for us, and I need you to take command of the operation. I’m countin’ on you, son. Get this done quick and clean.”

Not fired.

I order my unit to pack up and move out to ShogunSmile’s AO. Three minutes later I’m in the OpsDeck screen and going through the briefing on the superlab.

“Scouts have discovered a hidden complex up-country in the mountains near the city of Song Hua,” begins the briefing program avatar, a military admin type. The high-res photos show a small complex nestled beneath a mountain that’s more a giant oblong piece of rock erupting from the jungle than anything else. Stunted trees cling to one of its misty sides. The other side is a sheer rock face above the complex.

“Satellite imagery,” continues the briefing, “indicates the complex is a laboratory-class facility where dangerous and illegal superscience research has recently been conducted.”

WonderSoft will want this, but ColaCorp needs this. Whatever it is. These labs can provide bonus game-changing tech. No doubt WonderSoft will go for it, even if it’s just to deny us the asset.

The briefing camera, mounted on a recon drone, overflies the facility revealing a night-vision look at what we’re going into. It’s an open perimeter and a jumble of squat buildings in two adjacent locations. One location has the distinct look of a dropship landing pad, but slightly different from any I’ve seen before. The other looks too industrial to be anything but a lab. There’s a construction crane on the far side of the lab complex. The complex is mostly composed of octagonal interconnected modules that lead to a main multistoried building. The briefing asks me to choose which type of unit I’ll request to take into the superlab.

I tell it to give me the light infantry template.

The briefing hesitates, then takes me to the unit loadout screen. I try to activate my personal unit, Delta Company, but it won’t let me. “All main force ColaCorp units engaged at this time,” it tells me in its calm, computer voice. The only option available is to pull unknown players from the ColaCorp Special Forces reserve unit.

Great. I have to use amateurs. I stare at the facility map again. There’ll be three maps. There’re always three maps. I’m probably looking at the first one. So what’s the game?

Death match? Domination? Infection?

I check the ColaCorp Special Forces reserve roster. Currently there are over a hundred thousand plus ColaCorp fan-players waiting, worldwide, to join the network televised fight.

“Isolate veteran-status players and above.”

“Done,” replies the briefing avatar.

“Isolate light infantry skill sets.”

“Done.”

I want to tell the avatar to remove the ones with poor social skills and negative sportsmanship reviews, but sometimes those ratings are just the results of complaints filed by sore losers. Sometimes being good at online combat doesn’t necessarily make you great at being human.

“Isolate kill counts ten thousand and above.” Sure it’s WarWorld Live kills, the home game played on console with other amateurs, but ten thousand kills means they’re serious about the game and they’ve got some skills. That’s when I started getting noticed by professional teams.

“What’s my pool?” I ask.

“47,754 players meet your requirements,” replies the avatar.

“Isolate on-target percentage. Above 50 percent.”

I don’t even ask how many that leaves. I just want shooters now. “All right, fill all five squads from those requirements.”

A moment later the avatar sends invites to all players fitting my requirements. The first fifty to respond and log in to the OpsDeck are going in-game during prime time with me to take the superlab.

Within seconds the rosters are full.

“Please choose tactical insertion method,” the avatar tells me.

I check the map again.

I check my options. I’ve only got one. Dropship. In the map, I set the spinning holograph of the LZ marker down on the landing pad. There are three back-blast fences that surround the site. We can use those for cover before going into the main complex.

WonderSoft, on the other hand, can go in any number of ways. They’ve always got options because they’ve always got money.

Next I choose my weapons. I select my standard loadout for close-quarter matches like this. I take a gray and graphite black-striped Colt M4X assault rifle with extended banana clips and holographic tactical sights. Three dots, predator style. For my sidearm I take a nickel-plated long-barrel .45 loaded with hollow points. I also take five grenades: three flash-bangs, two smoke. I take my personal avatar skin, which is okayed by ColaCorp for tactical instance maps like this. ColaCorp jungle-pattern camo cargo pants and green tank top T-shirt. Jungle boots. Shaved head and a camo pattern I call SnakeFace. My guy even has stubble. Like me. Except the avatar skin is based on some action hero from the last century. Guy named Schwarzenegger. I’m big on last-century stuff. Things were better then.

“Going live in fifteen seconds … ,” says the briefing avatar as it begins the countdown to tactical map insertion.

I switch to BattleChat. Before saying anything, I bring up the unit roster. Most of the player IDs have been set to the default position by the network. Can’t be showing all kinds of disgusting images to the entire world. I check the names. They are the usual assortment of half-thought-through, misspelled crud that marks amateurs. Some outright obscene name choices, almost half, have been changed by the network to “Player” then a random number.

That’ll teach ’em to take this seriously. It’s their one shot at going online to fight in front of the whole world and no one will ever know who they are because the network changed their tag and used a placeholder name instead.

On-screen I see the red-lit interior of the dropship Albatross. I pan right and look out through the cockpit canopy. We’re cutting through a thick miasma of dark blue and black clouds. Rain assaults the windshield. I try to get a look at the facility from the air, but all I catch are tiny twinkling lights and shadowy buildings.

Moments later we’re down on the landing pad and rushing from the Albatross. Players head away from the dropship and go prone in a circular perimeter.

So far so good, and I didn’t even need to tell them to do that.

The dropship’s engines spool up and the craft lifts off and away from us, cutting its lights and retracting its landing gears as it disappears into the rain and clouds above.

King of the Hill appears across my screen.

I hate this type of match. Means we’ve got to secure the access point to the next map and hold it for three minutes. A King of the Hill match always turns into a shooting gallery for the side that doesn’t want to hold the access point.

“Listen up,” I say over BattleChat. “Name’s PerfectQuestion and this is the op …”

Meanwhile I’m selecting the streak rewards I’ll receive after each kill plateau.

“We’ve got to secure the entrance into this lab. That’s Map One. WonderSoft will try and do the same thing. Your first job, always, is to kill WonderSoft. Next, identify the entrance to the lab. Last, we’ll hold that entrance for three minutes. This is a movement to contact for now, squad tactics. I hope you took weapons you can run and gun with, ’cause we ain’t fightin’ no defense. Okay?” No one replies. “All right, now’s your chance to show ColaCorp something.”

In the dim blue light of the storm, a wild collection of jungle combat warriors rises from the tall grass near the LZ. I use my CommandPad to organize five squads of ten. Sure, we’re all wearing the same faded ColaCorp jungle green so that we look like a team and are only slightly different than WonderSoft’s standard digital gray jungle-camo pattern, but the similarity ends there. Some avatars have shaved heads. Some are wearing boonie hats. One guy even has a K-pot from World War Two. It’s all stuff they’ve either bought through WarWorld’s online store or earned as achievements. I couldn’t care less how they look. I’m just hoping they’ve leveled up their weapons. I’d hate to be going into this with someone using the basic unmodded AK-2000 you start WarWorld Live with. But I quickly notice many of the weapons are skinned with high-tech paint jobs and scoped with state-of-the-art targeting systems. That bodes well for impending current events.