“ ’Sup, Boss?”
Thorn said, “I just had a wonderful discussion with General Hadden,” he began.
“Uh oh.”
“Yeah, you got that part right . . .”
20
The FBI and military intelligence had ops chasing information on the dead terrorist, too, and after talking to Thorn, Jay decided that his time might be better spent working on things they couldn’t find as well as he could. So after Thorn left, Jay bagged the jungle-man scenario and flew off to the other side of the Moon.
From the lip of the crater where he stood, Jay had a good view of the alien base. For all that it was the “dark” side of Luna, there was a good amount of light—unnatural light, to be sure, but still. The terrain was rocky here, just north of Mare Ingenii—the Sea of Cleverness, which seemed an appropriate location.
He was at one of the final levels of the bug game. And it was stumping him—he couldn’t figure out which military base it corresponded to in the RW.
He jumped, falling down the wall of the crater. Gravity was only 0.165 that of Earth, but there was inertia, so he used his braking rockets to slow his descent even more. He floated downward like a broad leaf.
The VR was gorgeous. Dynamic lighting and particle effects added to the visuals, making him feel that he was really
He wasn’t live in this mission—the goal here was to evaluate the base and see if he could find out what his team had missed. So the game was frozen as he roamed around the set.
He trotted toward the base, kicking up more slo-mo dust.
The base was roughly hexagonal, the most unusual layout he’d seen yet. It was a deep blue color, and slightly translucent, as if made from huge sapphire crystals. There were alien-sized air locks on all six sides, with larger, vehicle-sized locks on three walls.
The walls had a monumental look, like something built in ancient Sumeria or Babylon. He almost expected to see huge bull-gods emblazoned on the wall, or ziggurats peeking up from inside.
Some memory nagged at the back of his mind. As if he’d seen this before—something like it, but not this, exactly.
He hit a button on his space suit and was propelled upward by a small rocket on his backpack. The wall was well-defined VR, but not quite as sharp as the rest of the scenario. The crystalline texture seemed to have been overlaid on somewhat older code. It wasn’t as . . . integrated as the rest of the scene.
He reached the top of the wall and looked at the roofline.
Here was a sharper, more defined VR—a herringbone of giant crystals.
Jay paused the scenario and shifted frame of reference, which grew larger as the base shrank to the size of a coffee table.
“Remove newer base sections as defined by these parameters,” he said to the analysis program. He rattled off some code.
The base shimmered for a moment, and then it reformed, still six-sided, but now looking more like an ancient walled city, without a roof.
He
Jay paused the scenario and exited to personal cyberspace. He was in a wood-paneled hallway with leather-wrapped doors leading off it. Here was the Game Room, the repository of games he had gathered over twenty years, going back to when he was a kid. Each door had a brass plate with a year engraved on it.
When had he seen it? What year had it been?
A few VR glove motions later, the walls of the corridor morphed outward, expanding into a cavernous space. Acres of blond oak floor stretched out toward art exhibits, each representing a favorite video game he’d played.
Here, a Rodin-like pose by Gordon Fremaux from
None of these, of course. But he was sure it was this way.
He reached the section of VR games made up of realistic dioramas.
Past the
The city layout wasn’t hexagonal, but that would have been easy to change with a few lines of code. What was important was that, aside from the shape and the new overlays, this was the same basic structure.
Jay read the card posted on the wall of the exhibit.
He remembered it. VR games had been fairly new, and someone had written a massive multiplayer on-line version of a game that had hundreds of players attacking the ancient city of Troy.
A buddy had told him about it, so he’d gone to see it via VR. The experiment had turned into several weeks of multiple-player gaming, culminating in the destruction of the ancient city. It was a beautiful, thoughtful, complex scenario. Jay had been impressed at the time. It was still impressive. Helen, Paris, Achilles, Ajax, the gods . . .
He VR-shifted and was inside the game again.
No doubt about it—same wall structure, same gateways.
The purpose of all the other bug-game levels had been to break into real-world bases, but something was not right here. What was he missing?
“Topographic scan to crater walls, overlay and search for Terran base matches.”
An aural progress bar played—this one the sound of a locomotive chugging closer and closer before Dopplering away. When it was finished, a steam whistle blew. Maybe this wasn’t so much about a real base as it was about something else?
“One match found.” His generic, non-scenario-specific programs usually had a sexy, sultry female voice. This one was no different.
Jay tapped a space near where the steam whistle had sounded and a blue globe appeared in front of him. It spun and rotated. He triggered a flyby mode, and suddenly he was scaled to human size over the globe, flying across it, heading toward where the program had found a match.
He was moving past the northern tip of South America to the Caribbean. Now he was heading toward the water.
He went along with the sim and found himself underwater, looking at a huge submerged base, domed in some sections, more like tin cans in another. A nuclear submarine was docked at the base.
He had his answer. This was an Army VR construct—it wasn’t real. Some kind of practice run, to get the topographic stuff right. A test pattern.
Jay grinned. At least that part of the problem was solved.
So, either somebody who had access to it had swiped the game data from MIT, or maybe whoever had built Troy, the game, was the person who used it as a basis for the bug-war scenario. Either way, it was a big clue. It
