S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (38 page)

“I know Jessie,” Kelly said. “Once she gets something in her head, she finds a way to make it happen.”

“She's just upset about her mother. Once she figures out it's not possible to go, she'll come home. Better the police don't know about any attempt.” She sighed. “I'm actually more worried that we'll lose her Link. We're close to needing that packet. I'm doing one final test for the cure. You should try to ping her again.”

He shook his head. “I have, a couple dozen times already. It goes straight to voice mail. She's not connecting.”

“But she's still on the stream.”

Kelly nodded.

“See? She's not on Gameland.” She coughed into her hand, and Kelly got another whiff of that rancid smell.

“Are you feeling alright?”

“Just the flu is all,” she replied. “Listen, let me try and secure another Player identifier code. Use it to retrieve her grandfather's Link.”

“And Micah?”

“Kelly,” she said, exhaling tiredly, “you know as well as I do that Micah Sandervol is dead.” She wheezed out a dry chuckle. “Now stop worrying so much. She'll come back sooner the less you push.”

She got stiffly out of her chair and gestured to the door. “Go sit with your mother-in-law. Don't worry about Jessica.”

“Jessie. She doesn't like Jessica.”

Doctor White smiled thinly. “Yes, she told me. I keep forgetting not to call her that. Tomorrow, we'll start fresh. I'll get another Player and— ” She coughed again and shrugged. “Getting that key is our top priority. Once we have it, everything else will be fine.”

‡ ‡ ‡

What the hell are you doing, Jessie?

She balled her fists and thrust them against her eyelids until stars shot across the darkness before her eyes.

You should be with your mother instead of playing with zombies.

I'm not playing!

Besides, what good would it do to sit by the bed and pray? She didn't believe in prayer. She didn't believe good things happened just because you wanted them to. That had been her problem all these years. All of this had come about because she
had
just sat by and done nothing but hope for the best.

But this? This is suicide.

Maybe. But she owed her mother that much. She owed Kelly and Reggie and the rest of them as much, too.

The wheels of the bus hummed over the uneven surface of the road. She was glad the inside lights were off. She didn't want anyone to see her face, not because of the tears — she had shed her last even before showing up at ArcWare's training facility earlier that evening, demanding they begin her orientation — but because she didn't want to draw attention to herself. The less people saw of her, the better. If she knew Kelly, he'd probably already tried to get the police to intervene, thinking he was doing her a favor.

You're being paranoid.

“I'm being practical,” she whispered.

The ghost of the moon followed them as they rode north on the elevated highway. It glimmered over the swamplands to the east, dodging the sunken abandoned buildings, and skimming over the marshes. In less than twenty minutes she'd be back in Greenwich. It was almost midnight, and she wondered whether Eric and Kelly would be at home or the hospital. She guessed Eric would be with their mother. Kelly would be home, waiting for her. She didn't have a plan for how she was going to deal with either of them.

She stood up when the bus pulled into the station three blocks from the hospital, and she stretched the stiffness from her muscles. She had brought nothing and so had nothing to carry, and they hadn't given her anything when she'd left her outfitting. “Be back at eight in the morning,” she'd been told. “Bring enough changes of clothing to stay here a week.”

Tomorrow was the first day of conditioning. It was also when they would be inserting her sensory devices— corneal and inner ear implants. She was a little nervous about those, but she tried not to think about it. The tech had assured her they were no more of a problem than getting her blood drawn. “A couple tiny pricks and
voila
, you're good to go.”

She thought about how Reggie would've cracked a joke about tiny pricks, and it made her angry.

From what she'd already experienced, the new gear was a thousand times more sensitive than anything Arc had ever developed before. “Makes last year's model feel old and rickety,” the tech had told her. Though, she was a bit worried to learn she was going to be among the first to use it. Her worry quickly became swallowed by her rage when he'd added, “Arc expects to make five billion just in upgrades during the first twenty-four hours of sales after they make their official announcement next week.”

Jessie wondered how Micah could possibly afford it. Or why he'd even bother with the newest gear. But then she realized that he'd probably stolen the funds. And as for the second question, maybe he knew something about it that she didn't.

Doesn't matter
, she reminded herself.
It's not like you're going to be needing it after tomorrow anyway.

For now, she'd play his game. But after that, she'd make the rules.

The hospital doors swooshed open and she stepped through into the bright light of the lobby. She swept her gaze left and right for any familiar faces, but saw none. She took the stairs up to the fourth floor, stepping quietly and listening at each landing. She even slipped out on the third floor when the door above her opened and someone entered the stairwell. She hid behind a laundry cart around the corner from Doctor White's office, and was even tempted to knock on her door. But she knew no good would come of it.

She still didn't like the woman, and she trusted her not at all. Besides, it was almost a certainty that Kelly had told her about what she was planning. She didn't think White would've found it to her liking.

When she was sure the person in the stairwell was gone, she hurried up the last flight.

As she had expected, Eric was sitting by the bed, their mother's hand in his. He appeared to be asleep, but with his head tilted back the way it was and the fact that he wasn't snoring, she knew he was anything but. There was no sign of Kelly.

She slipped back to the nurse's station and asked how her mother was doing. The charge nurse checked her tablet. “She's strong, stable. The doctor was surprised. The first twelve hours are critical. We'll know better in the morning if she's going to need surgery.”

“Has she woken, said anything?”

“No, I'm sorry, honey. Isn't your brother in there with her now?”

“He's asleep. I didn't want to wake him.”

The nurse nodded. “Of course. You look exhausted yourself. You should go on home and get some sleep. I'll ping you if her condition changes.”

Jessie took her time walking home, trying to come up with a way to sneak in without Kelly knowing. But after arriving at her front door without a solution, and seeing the lights on inside and Kelly pacing in the living room, she slipped into the shadows beneath a tree down the street and pinged a text to him to come meet her at the hospital. She ignored his reply asking what was happening.

Two minutes later, she watched him run down the steps pulling a fresh tee shirt over his head. She could see the glow of his Link in his hand as he hurried away down the sidewalk, and she knew he was pinging Eric, which meant she'd only have a few minutes before they discovered her subterfuge. So, as soon as he was out of sight, she slipped into the house. Knowing what she needed, she was in and out in less than seven minutes.

She spent the balance of the night tucked into a dark doorway downtown. Around three-thirty, a truck pulled up to the curb at the city park across the square and unloaded a team of Undead. For the next hour, she watched as they tended the grounds, not a single Operator in sight. Her head kept bobbing, and her eyelids drooped. When next she looked up, she was alone once more.

Finally, just as the sky was starting to brighten, she stood up and stretched. According to her Link, both Kelly and Eric had pinged her several times.

At five minutes past six, she caught the first bus to Arc's training facility in New Jersey.

‡ ‡ ‡

“The trick to the new rigs,” the instructor was telling her, “is not to act out what you intend your Player to do, but to convey that intention to the Player in a single discrete thought.”

“One thought,” Jessie said.
This guy's a fruitcake
, she thought. “Got it.”

“Good. Here's what I want you to do: Walk your Player over to the middle door there, open it, select the item on the third shelf up, and place that item in the middle of the blue table on the other side of the room.”

Jessie frowned. “That's a whole lot of steps. How can I—”

“One thought. That's all you need. What should it be?”

Jessie shook her head. “Walk over and open the door and—”

“Wrong! Those are steps. You're itemizing your Player's actions. We're entering a new era of game-play, one in which the Players are faster, stronger, more alive because the instructions they're getting from you are more streamlined. And the timing couldn't be more perfect, since starting tomorrow some of them
will
be alive.”

“Live Players?”

The instructor nodded. “The public hasn't been told, yet. The official announcement's tomorrow, but I don't think you'll be going out and blabbing to anyone, right?”

Jessie shook her head. “Scout's honor.”

“That's my girl. When you go to lunch, make sure you get a chance to introduce yourself to our first official Live team. They're quite the crew.”

“They're here?”

He nodded. “Okay, back to training. We need to get you comfortable with your new gear and the way you connect. It's not exactly intuitive, except it actually is. Know what I mean?”

“No.”

“Never mind. Just know that once we work out the kinks, you'll be able to play
The Game
whenever and wherever you want— at work , school, while eating dinner, sitting in church. Maybe even when you're asleep.”

“Seriously?”

He laughed. “Joking about the church part.”

“Yeah. Ha ha.”

“My job is to train you to train your mind to consider the Player as an extension of your own body. It's all about connecting your
intentions
to the part of your mind that processes actions.”

She stared at him, unsure if he was being serious. She couldn't decide if he was still joking or was just some kind of Zen-master screwball.

“Raise your left hand over your head and touch your right ear,” he told her. “Go on,” he urged when she hesitated.

She did as he asked.

“Good. Now, describe the steps your mind outlined for you to do that.”

“The steps? I didn't think of any steps. I pictured myself touching my right ear.”

“Exactly. But from an information processing standpoint, your brain had to break down that task into discrete steps: left arm and not right, raise it up and over your head, bend at the elbow and wrist, extend fingers, touch opposite ear, grab. And each of those steps can be further broken down into smaller steps. But consciously, all you had to do was picture the act, the final outcome, and your brain created the path. That's how you're going to learn to control your player.”

“To touch its opposite ear?”

“That. Tying its shoes. Playing the piano. Whatever you can do, you should be able to train your mind to have the Player do.”

She tried to imagine her Player playing the piano.

“Now, about that object I asked for earlier, instruct your Player to fetch it for me.”

Jessie turned toward the glass partition and winced for the twentieth time since resuming her training. Would she ever get used to seeing her former hapkido master as a CU? Would she ever stop thinking of it as her master and start thinking of herself as its?

The zombie twitched as the instructor inserted Jessie's Link into the slot at her hip, instantly connecting the two. Kwanjangnim Rupert took a single aimless step and moaned loudly.

“Don't worry,” the instructor told her, “it doesn't know we're here.”

“I know.”

He smiled patronizingly. “It's always unnerving, the first time you come so close to one. But that's shatterproof glass between it and us. It'll probably be the closest you'll ever come to one.”

Ha! If you only knew.

He nodded his head, urging her to continue to attempt to fulfill his request.

Jessie concentrated. She was hyperaware of herself, of the movements her arms and legs and chest made as she stood there. “Go to the door,” she muttered. The monster took a clumsy step and turned in the opposite direction than the one she intended.

“Don't speak. Just
think
. Picture yourself executing the tasks, then imagine the Player executing them in your place.”

I'm imagining it strangling you
, she thought, then choked when Rupert turned right toward the instructor, raised its arms and hissed.

† † †

“Standish tells me you've bought one of the premier packages. That'll give you a nice advantage— when you learn how to use it. Well, you'll need it.”

Jessie looked up from her lunch tray. The man standing over her had the face of a boxer, except boxing had been outlawed years back.
Maybe he used to be one
. He certainly had the jaw for it. And the cauliflower ears. And his hands looked like sledgehammers.

“May I?” he asked, nodding at the empty seat next to her.

She frowned and he cracked a smile. “I'm not hitting on you, Miss. I've got daughters your age.”

“Then what are you doing?” she asked.

“You looked lonely, sitting here all by your lonesome.”

“No, really. What do you want?”