The Scarab
Authors: Scott Rhine
Chapter 4 –
Spending Everything
Chapter 10 –
Salvage and Goodwill
Chapter 12 –
Paris and Pensatronics
Chapter 13 –
Monaco and Machineguns
Chapter 16 –
Mysterious Disappearances
Chapter 20 –
Back from the Dead
Chapter 24 –
Everything but the Squeal
Chapter 25 –
Operation Rubber Duck
Amazon Edition
Copyright 2011 Scott Rhine
DISCLAIMER:
This is a work of fiction. Corporations, places,
and characters depicted herein are imaginary and for entertainment purposes
only. Any similarity to real companies, places, or people is coincidental.
To my wife, Tammy, who
believes in me.
Thanks, also, to Weston
Kincade for the edits.
I closed my eyes and listened to the squad car’s engine run.
I liked fixing cars because there’s always a right answer if you pay attention.
My dad used to say, “An engine problem comes down to a simple matter of fuel,
air, and fire.” Of course, these days, there’s a lot of software added into the
mix, but that’s pretty black and white as well. Sometimes, I wish people came
with manuals.
I scratched my black, scraggly
beard as I thought. I tell my boss that I wear it to look more credible to the
customers. But the main reason I don’t shave is that I hate razors. I’m a
hemophiliac and, the last time I cut myself, I ended up staying a week in the
hospital. The clotting agent they gave me had been tainted by a donor who made
a habit of sharing needles. I know I could use an electric shaver, but then the
scar on my jaw would show.
Closing the hood, I announced, “Your
harmonic balancer is broken.”
The regulars from the barber shop
next door nodded, and a few dollar bills traded hands. It was a small town. The
officer whose vehicle I had diagnosed wasn’t convinced. “You can’t tell that
just by ear!”
I kept my mouth closed. Police
usually rub me the wrong way; I’d inherited just enough swarthy complexion from
my Mom that I reminded authorities of whatever group they were profiling now.
Sam, the owner of Sam’s Floater
Physicians, backed me. “There’s a reason he’s the head mechanic after only five
years, Deputy.”
We didn’t have money, so I did all
of my Mom’s repair work growing up. I started wrenching here at age sixteen.
The officer pointed to the
uniformed picture of Sam’s son, Nick, behind the cash register. Nick had died
in action a year after high school. “He was your boy’s friend.”
Sam got cold and civil. “You’ve had
two other shops stumped. Your engine isn’t mounted properly anymore. It fits
all the symptoms you told me.”
The deputy grunted, “Just a bolt?
That doesn’t sound too bad. How much?”
Sam asked, “Ethan, how long will it
take?”
I replied, “It’s a three hour job,
minimum. He’ll need new belts, too. If you want us to take care of that vacuum
leak while we’re that deep, I can probably do it for just another half hour.”
The deputy had a small aneurism when
Sam gave him the estimate. He stood nose to nose with me, but didn’t think
about shoving into my personal space. In high school, I lifted weights instead
of participating in contact sports. Eventually, I could bench press my own
weight, and people started leaving me alone.
“I can run it without a stupid bolt
for another month.”
“That could be fatal, sir,” I
explained. “Follow me.” The whole gang shuffled into the shop behind me. I
brought up the high-resolution surround-screen diagnostic simulator, punched in
the police car’s make and model, and a three-dimensional schematic appeared. The
car frame was transparent in the rendering, giving it the appearance of
blue-tinged glass. I rotated to show the undercarriage and then removed the balancer
connection with a click. “The ‘bolts’ remaining aren’t strong enough. If you
hit another car or telephone pole at low speed…” I hit the collision button on
the screen. The cam shaft on the screen detached, and the engine was totaled
within seconds.
The deputy deflated. “I’ll leave
the keys up front.”
Sam clapped me on the shoulder. “Good
job, Mr. Hayes. I didn’t know our simulation rig had a collision button.”
“It didn’t. I learned to program in
sim language a while back. I borrowed most of the code from a program at MIT,”
I said, failing to mention it was from a massively interactive game site.
Excitement over, Sam helped me pack
up the tools and sweep up. Promptly at seven, I turned off the lights and
locked the doors. When I was alone, I rolled my chair back to the simulator,
and started my second life. Slipping on the data gloves, I pushed another
button on the console. On nights and weekends, to hundreds of gamers, I became
the mysterious and deadly Scarab.
This close to MIT there is an
enormous net community connected around the clock, and the college version of
GEVSIM is popular for spectators and players alike. As the name implies, GEVSIM
involves players designing their own Ground Effect Vehicles (GEVs) and racing
them at high speeds on a simulated obstacle course until only one of the
combatants remains. Aside from the laser targeting systems, entertainment
really hasn’t changed that much since the Roman chariot races.
My boss and his parent company
Exotech don’t know I play, and to help keep it that way, nobody on the net
knows my real name. Exotech has strict rules about unauthorized use of its
computers by indentured servants. Under the Credit Repayment Act, they only
give me a minimum wage to live on, and all the rest of my salary goes to pay
off my own medical bills and the debts my mother accrued during her terminal
illness.
I wouldn’t call the game an
addiction; I just have frequent insomnia during the summer, and the garage had
air-conditioning that my squalid apartment across the street lacked.
I didn’t start out trying to design
the ultimate driving machine; I just got a little bored with winning. I started
by making obvious improvements to stock vehicles. Eventually I gave up and
started designing my own.
Ground-effect vehicles were based
on a phenomenon that occurs when a helicopter is trying to hover close to the
ground. If the pilot stays within about one rotor radius of the ground, more
air is forced into the area under the craft than can escape out the sides. The
result is that the power required to hover in that spot drops drastically. The
benefit degrades at high speeds or over grass, but works fine on asphalt.
Tonight I was entering a radical
new prototype into a small side game in Finland, and I had to clear the model
with the expert system referee first. Colleges had pirated the simulator code
from SimCon, a yearly event which involved all the major car makers. The
official simulator cared about streamlined appearance, passenger comfort, fuel
economy, safety, noise pollution, blind spots, and average time till repair—all
the facts usually monitored by Consumer Reports. This thorough simulation has
pointed out several design problems and prevented several recalls before
vehicle production even began. The simplified pirate version used in local games
cared about only one thing—what on-line manuals do your parts and weapons come
from?
The three panel display for the
simulation looked like a normal windshield and control panel. The overhead GPS
map view plotted all the other race vehicles just like real cars do, using the FedNet
global positioning system. FedNet uses the transponders under the front and
rear bumper of every vehicle to track its location, speed, and direction. This
technology was originally intended for autopilot steering, computerized mapping,
and avoiding traffic jams. Mandatory transponder use, intended to enforce the
national speed limit and prevent accidents, was viewed by many as a colossal
violation of privacy. Unfortunately, two teenagers joy-riding in Florida broadsided a bus full of school kids and the legislation got railroaded through
without debate.
After twenty minutes, I convinced
the referee that I could keep my engines running at almost a constant speed.
Any energy not being used for movement would be channeled into rotating the
hull of the vehicle, much like the 1960’s UFOs or the blade of a spiral power
saw. This greatly simplified my fuel consumption, engine design, and autopilot
software, as well as giving me the ability to accelerate in almost any
direction, seconds ahead of the competition. Most GEVs steer like airplanes,
with fast forward movement and slow, wide turns. My design would handle like a
helicopter; whichever way I leaned the joystick, that’s where I’d go.
The one disadvantage I foresaw was
that if I braked too fast, the torque from the suddenly spinning hull would pop
me up in the air like a champagne cork. To turn this unwanted height to my
advantage, I also hung a machine gun from the underbelly of the craft. That
way, if anybody was hot on my tail, I could brake fast, and strafe them as they
flew under me.
I picked this out-of-the-way game
so that I could work out the kinks without anybody discovering my design.
Looking over the roster of logins, I only spotted two from the United States, and one from Germany likely to give me grief. By e-mail, I offered twenty gallons of
fuel from my reserve tank to “Gandalf” from Belgium if he could eliminate any
of the three.
The course was composed of two
intersecting ovals. There were sharp embankments at the ends for high speed
turning with sand at the base to put out fires. The center had light posts, oil
slicks, and tank traps for slaloming and pits with ramps for jumping. One
complete lap was required every five minutes to avoid disqualification. The
first player to reach twenty-four laps or ten kills would win.
The virtual race started around
eight. For the first twenty minutes, I hung around the perimeter of the track,
avoiding conflict and pointing out kill opportunities to less experienced
players. I was running in non-rotation mode in order to calibrate my controls
and get a feel for how all of the other subsystems performed. This vehicle had
a revolutionary suspension, improved altimeter and banking indicators, and
idiot-simple pilot controls.
By the time the other players
caught on, I was one of the final four, and the others were converging on me
from all sides. A vicious Berkeley student calling himself “Metallica” had made
a truce with “Red Dwarf” and “Red Oktober” to see who could dust me first. No
one had scored me in the past thirty-seven games.
“Gonna squash you bug man!”
Metallica broadcast.
I sent back a digitized video clip
from some old Mummy movie with a scarab necklace killing a tomb desecrator. I
can’t even send voice on the garage rig, but it adds to my air of mystery.
The kid had a point, though.
Without the secret weapon, my GEV wallowed like an elephant in quicksand. When
the others were about fifteen seconds away, I started rotation. At forty km/h,
I noticed the first glitch. My satellite velocity indicator read forty, but the
direction indicator had me traveling northeast! The period of rotation was such
that when the simulated satellite guidance system looked at the front of my
vehicle, it was always pointing the same direction. Holding at this rate of
revolution, I tried an experiment. Nudging my joy-stick west, I watched the
velocity indicator jump to forty-five, but still in the northeast direction.
The other three players fired their
long-range weapons at where my icon appeared on the strategy map with no
effect. They passed harmlessly through my shadow; in fact, someone’s rogue
missile locked onto “Red Oktober’s” vehicle and blew it to pieces. And then
there were three.
Now that they were all in close
range, I began to worry about how my camouflage would hold up under scrutiny.
Someone was bound to notice my blip slowly creeping in the wrong direction once
the scale changed on their overhead displays. Stopping cold would make me dead
meat at this point, since both enemies were behind me. Because my pilot was
always facing forward and at the same angle, I couldn’t see back there to
target my machine guns. This was a serious design flaw I would correct once I
got out of this mess.
“Metallica” acted first with a
salvo of incendiary shells. Without thinking, I increased engine output to the
red line and tried to evade. My heading indicators went insane for a moment and
then the compass needle vanished entirely. I disappeared from both the overhead
and the forward view screens. I was rotating faster than the screen refresh
rate and had made myself effectively invisible to the enemy.
“Red Dwarf” immediately assumed I
had been vaporized and was out of the game. Sometimes the computer was just a
few seconds late in registering the kill, especially with overseas phone lines.
With the truce officially over, “Dwarf” took the opportunity to lay impeller
mines in an arc around the area. “Metallica” blew himself up while turning to
avoid my presumed wreckage.
“Red Dwarf” slowed to a halt,
waiting for the traditional virtual blonde to come out and crown him with
laurel leaves. Unable to resist the bait, I slapped the prototype into reverse.
I’d run over the smug geek and he’d never know what hit him.
Design flaw number three surfaced
about then. Reverse gear also tried to reverse the direction of the hull spin.
Have you ever slapped your car into reverse while going 100 km/h? Chunks of
simulated engine block shot half a meter into the asphalt. At the last second,
my icon flickered into existence again, and my red “self-destruct” symbol came
on. It was a feature most racers had. If you were just crippled, the simulation
would eject your pilot and blow the car so that no one else could cannibalize
your equipment and the map could stop rendering you.
The ironic part was that I was
still undefeated. Since “Red Dwarf’s” pilot was outside his vehicle’s armor, he
got caught in the blast radius from all the unspent fifty caliber shells I had
stockpiled. Technically, the game ended in a draw because I had killed the
winner before being eliminated myself. I told the other guys on the net that my
new self-destruct feature only worked when another player was within a certain
range. Nobody suspected that I was lying to keep bigger secrets.