Finally he gave Ella a rueful smile and continued. ‘Before I begin, Miss Thomas, I am obliged to tell you that this mission has a certain element of danger attached to it.’
Ah, shit… goodbye college.
What was the old adage? Anything that seemed too good to be true was too good to be true.
Ella swallowed hard, trying to mask her disappointment. She didn’t quite know what to make of what this General person was saying. This whole interview was teetering on the surreal. All she was was a singer trying to raise enough money to get to university and to keep her kid brother out of trouble. She wasn’t a heroine. She didn’t do danger. But then all they were asking her to do was play some stupid computer game. She asked the obvious question. ‘How dangerous?’
‘Very.’
What sort of computer game was this?
‘Oh come on, don’t be coy, General, Sir: what are the chances I’ll get to spend the million?’
The General sat back in his chair and massaged the bridge of his nose. He was a man under a lot of pressure. ‘Okay… the chances of you surviving the mission are fifty-fifty: one chance in two. But the million would be paid regardless of the outcome,’ he added quickly. ‘In the event of your failing…’
‘Failing’ or as it’s better known in less polite circles, ‘getting slotted’.
‘… the money will still be paid to your next of kin.’
Oh great, so I get a one-way ticket to Slab Central and Billy gets the chance to see how quickly he can shove a million bucks’ worth of coke up his nose.
Ella pushed the idea of dying to one side: she’d worry about that later. Like in seventy years.
‘Why me? You’ve got the whole American armed forces to choose from. There must be someone in the army with a decent set of pipes; there must be someone who can sing jazz. There must be someone out there better qualified than me.’
The General shuffled uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Oh, the Army is full of jazz singers, Miss Thomas, but unfortunately not one of them can match the requirements necessary to fulfil this mission. That is why we have undertaken this somewhat protracted audition process. You, Miss Thomas, are a very special young woman, combining as you do vocal ability, intelligence, beauty, physical and mental resilience and a specific racial aspect.’
Oh, come on, General: let’s call a spade a spade. I ain’t got a ‘racial aspect’. I’ve got a black skin.
‘This combination of talents means you are the only person who can undertake this mission. You are unique.’
Tap, tap, tap.
The General finally realised he’d been playing with the pencil and put it firmly down on his desk. ‘So, Miss Thomas, before I go any further, I need to know if you are interested in my proposition.’
Really she had no option. The life she could see stretching before her could be summarised in the declension: broke, broker, brokest. She was trailer-park trash with a junkie for a brother, and her prospects were zero and falling. People like her didn’t turn down the chance to pocket a million bucks.
‘Oh, I’m interested, General, Sir. In fact I’ve got a million bucks’ worth of interest. But before I sign on the dotted line I’m gonna need a lot more information.’
‘Very well, Miss Thomas: what I am about to apprise you of is highly classified. Divulging any of this information to nonauthorised personnel is a criminal offence… a very serious criminal offence, one for which you could go to prison for a very long time. Do you understand?’
It was Ella’s turn to nod and at that instant it seemed as though the walls of the General’s office had closed in on her. She had the distinct impression that things were about to get a whole lot heavier.
‘Do you know what Asymmetric Warfare is, Miss Thomas?’
Dumb Question #3.
‘Yeah, I had one once but the wheels fell off.’
The General obviously didn’t do humour; he simply ignored Ella’s quip. ‘Asymmetric Warfare is the US Military’s name for all those messy little conflicts that our country keeps finding itself fighting in hellish places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. They are wars without rules and without honour and, to be blunt, they are wars that the US Army isn’t particularly good at fighting. When the US Military began to study its performance in Asymmetric Warfare Environments it discovered that its soldiers, especially its officers, weren’t effective because they had no appreciation or understanding of what sort of war they would be fighting. So in order to prepare them better the US Army InDoctrination and Training Command came up with the idea of creating a computer simulation that would let our combat personnel experience what was waiting for them in Peshawar and desperate places like it.’
‘The Demi-Monde?’ Ella ventured.
‘Got it in one, Miss Thomas. The Demi-Monde is the most sophisticated, the most complex and the most terrifying computer simulation ever devised. It’s a simulation which recreates the visceral anxiety and fear of being in an AWE…’
‘An AWE?’
‘An Asymmetric Warfare Environment. To play the DemiMonde you have to be hard-wired into it and the hard-wiring creates a full sensory bypass: you believe you are in the DemiMonde. For those in the Demi-Monde it is the only perceivable reality: neoFights – military trainees – are utterly enveloped in the simulation.’
‘That sounds scary.’
‘It is and it’s meant to be. It’s also vitally important if the training paradigm is to be as realistic as possible. AWEs are scary so the simulation of them has to be scary. With conventional computer simulations the player always knows that what they are involved in is just a game, they know that if he or she gets uncomfortable with what’s happening in the simulation all they have to do is press “Pause”. This isn’t an option for Demi-Monde players.’
The General took a sip of his coffee as he gathered his thoughts. ‘But this isn’t the only remarkable thing about the Demi-Monde. The US Military has employed computer simulations for training purposes before, but the problem with modelling Asymmetric Warfare Environments is that they are so unpredictable, so chaotic, so non- linear as to make modelling them almost impossible. Contrarily, the very act of programming AWEs means that we impose rules on the simulations and hence make cyber-representations of AWEs predictable. It’s a Catch-22 situation: we need a computer program to replicate the anarchy of an Asymmetric Warfare Environment but the very act of programming makes it unanarchic.’
Unanarchic? Is that a word?
‘The solution, Miss Thomas, was to make the Demi-Monde program heuristic.’
‘Heuristic?’ asked Ella cautiously.
This was getting to be, like, Big Words 101.
‘It means “self-taught”: we provided the initial programming to get the Demi-Monde up and running, we defined the basics of the cyber-milieu and the formatting modality of the simulation but after that the computer did its own thing. The computer changed – optimised – the function and the actions of the Dupes who populate the simulation to make their performance more arbitrary and, hence, more realistic. What this means is that from a simulation point of view immediately the Demi-Monde was activated how it performed and developed was out of our hands. The Demi-Monde is an unpredictable environment, which is perfect when describing an AWE.’
‘Look, I’m no nerd,’ admitted Ella, ‘but this sounds kinda freaky. And aren’t you gonna have to use a pretty big computer?’
‘The Demi-Monde is the first program to be run by ParaDigm CyberResearch’s ABBA class of quantum computers.’
‘ABBA?’
‘ABBA is a computer developed by the British. It is the most powerful computer ever devised. It has an almost unlimited processing power… enough to simulate sentience in each of the thirty million Dupes that populate the Demi-Monde.’
‘Thirty million? That’s one hell of a lot of Dupes.’ Ella might not be a fan of computer games but she knew enough to realise that even the biggest and the best only ever had a handful of cyber-characters interacting at any one time.
The General put a piece of gum in his mouth. ‘That’s ABBA for you: it can handle thirty million Dupes at a
