The Utopia Experiment

45

“Damnit!” Smith said in a harsh whisper.

The bullet went well wide of him, but it barely missed Randi, slicing through the branches only inches from her left shoulder. She cut right, nearly losing her balance on the soft earth as she tried to put a tree between her and the shooter.

His ankle was in bad shape and combined with the weak moonlight penetrating the trees, his progress had slowed to an unsteady jog. They’d made it farther than he’d expected into the wilderness but their pursuers were gaining ground fast.

Smith turned and fired at a fading flash behind them, but when he did, his ankle finally gave out. He splayed out on the ground and a moment later a bullet that should have found its mark passed overhead.

Randi came back for him, pulling him to his feet and taking some of his body weight as they hobbled down a slippery bank toward a stream turned black by the moonlight. They dropped to their stomachs in the mud and searched behind them, but there was only the dark outline of the forest. The three men were still coming — of that there was no doubt. But they’d gone silent.

“Damn!” she said, so quietly that he barely heard despite the fact that they were lying nearly on top of each other.

Her frustration was understandable. He’d played a similar game countless times over the past months. Their opponents had heat detection, light amplification, outline enhancement, targeting, and a host of other military-specific apps. What he had was a thin polo shirt, a swelling ankle, and a pair of slick-soled penny loafers.

“I can’t keep up,” he said, lips brushing Randi’s ear in an attempt to defeat their pursuer’s audio enhancement. It would be canceling out the sound of the wind and the brook behind them, searching for any noise that could be human-generated. “I hit your damn barbecue on the way down. But even if I hadn’t, we’re outmatched.”

She spoke equally softly. “Are you suggesting we surrender?”

That wouldn’t end well. But neither would their current non-strategy. The fact that their attackers hadn’t appeared and taken them out might suggest caution on their part. Or it could just mean that they were taking the time to flank them and would soon be coming in from all sides.

“No,” he said, looking at the water behind them as an idea started to form. “But we’re not going to win a fair fight with these three.”

“I’m all for making it an unfair fight if you’ve got something figured out.”

He pointed at a dense row of bushes to their right. “Go for those. When you get through them, head north.”

Even in the dim light he could see her skepticism. “Bullshit. You’re going to sacrifice yourself so I can get away.”

He shook his head. “I don’t like you that much. Keep your earpiece in. If you don’t hear from me in five, you’re not going to. If you do hear from me, do everything I tell you to the letter. Now give me your knife.”

She handed it to him but clearly wasn’t happy about the plan. Alternatives were hard to come by, though, and a moment later she was slithering into the bushes.

Despite her skill, the branches moved enough to be picked up by their pursuers’ motion detection overlay, but still there was silence. No doubt they didn’t want to give away their positions until they had a high-percentage shot.

Smith lowered his head and waited. Thirty seconds. A minute. Finally, he heard the rustle of branches at eleven o’clock.

The cold was already seeping into him but he ignored it and slid slowly toward the stream. The quiet gurgle as he entered it would be filtered out as background noise by the Merge worn by the men bearing down on him. One of the units’ few weaknesses.

The water was cold enough that his chest caught when he tried to breathe. A moment of concentration allowed him to get in enough air to go under, and he gripped a partially submerged sapling to keep himself hovering just inches beneath the surface.

A shadow passed near the bank and he watched it, trying to calculate how much time he had before hypothermia set in. Not until long after he’d drown or been shot, most likely. How comforting.

The water’s uniform temperature would fool the Merge’s heat detection and the reflection of the moonlight would dazzle the night vision, making the stream a complete blank to the man creeping slowly past it. As expected, he didn’t consider the water at all — another example of the Merge-induced overconfidence that he himself had fallen prey to on more than a few occasions.

There wasn’t much time. He wasn’t as desperate for air as he had been back in Randi’s safe room, but he wasn’t far off. The man crouched to get a closer look at the tracks in the mud. There would be no better chance.

Smith slipped smoothly out of the water and managed to grab the man before his Merge could make sense of the sound. His hands were numb but the oxygen flooding his lungs cleared his head enough to recall the education that Star thought was so wasted on him. Killing the man would immediately register on his teammate’s Merges. He had to be more skillful than that.

Smith barely managed to clamp a hand over the man’s mouth before he felt himself being pushed toward the water. As they toppled, he inserted the thin blade into the back of the struggling man’s neck, severing nerves he hadn’t thought about since medical school.

They hit the ground in unison and Smith wrapped his legs around the man’s waist, holding him tightly as his body jerked wildly and then went limp. A quick check of his pulse confirmed that it was still strong and racing, but that wouldn’t last long. He was completely paralyzed and that paralysis extended to the muscles that controlled respiration. The clock was ticking as he suffocated.

Smith searched beneath the man’s camo shirt and confirmed what he already knew: that the Merge he was using was military-issue. And ironically, that was what just might save them.

His fingers had been compromised by the cold but he still managed to get the unit off the man’s belt and crawl out of range of his head studs. He paused for a moment, trying to prepare himself before contacting the unit with his own skin and dropping onto his stomach in the mud.

As far as he knew, he was the only person who had any significant experience trying to use units set up for other people — experiments that had been necessary to see what would happen if the enemy gained access to one from a dead or injured soldier.

The research had been done only in an effort to be thorough — a U.S. Merge would be unusable by the enemy due to the fact that, beyond being indescribably unpleasant, the military network wouldn’t recognize their brain wave signature and would therefore deny access. He was on the army grid, though. In fact, he more or less controlled it.

The nausea started immediately, growing in strength as the Merge tried to link up with an unfamiliar mind. He knew from experience that this imperfect connection was possible. It would cause a momentary hesitation on the man’s teammates’ units and then somewhat garbled data that would look like a network issue.

After fifteen seconds, his vision swam sickeningly and the only thing keeping him from throwing up was the near hypothermia. His record for staying connected like this was thirty-nine seconds and it had involved some of the worst suffering he’d ever endured. This time, though, that wasn’t going to be anywhere near long enough.

Something flickered in his peripheral vision and a moment later distorted lettering confirmed his identity as “Lt. Col. Jon Smith” and gave him a level of access that only he and perhaps Dresner had.

Two distorted green dots appeared on an overhead of the battlefield, displaying the position of the paralyzed man’s teammates. There was a flash from one of them that represented rounds fired, but he could barely hear the shots over the metallic screech caused by the computer trying to funnel improperly encoded signals to his auditory cortex.

Using the menus was incredibly difficult, but he managed to shut down the voice port and press a hand to his throat mike.

“Randi…Are you…Are you still alive?”

“Barely,” came the nearly unintelligible response. “If I show so much as a thumbnail, these sons of bitches damn near shoot it off.”

Another flash came from one of the dots on his overhead and he heard her swear angrily.

“Are you hit?”

“Just a graze. But next time they’re going to kill me. I can’t see shit and they see everything. If you’ve got a plan, sometime in the next ten seconds would be good.”

“Where’s…Where’s the guy who just shot at you?” he said, sliding partially into the frigid water again to push back the nausea. He figured he was over thirty-nine seconds now and the suffering just kept intensifying.

“North by northeast about fifty meters.”

That gave him a good idea of her relative position.

“Okay. You have—”

He vomited violently, trying unsuccessfully to do it quietly.

“Jon? Jon? Are you there?”

“Yeah. You have another one coming in on you from…Wait. No. He heard me. He’s turning my way.”

“Can you handle him?”

“No,” he said, struggling to pull up the military simulation application. It became impossible to keep his head up and his face went down in the mud. Was he breathing? He couldn’t tell anymore.

The muffled sound of gunfire filtered through to him but he ignored it, concentrating on activating the training exercise system. It hesitated a few seconds but then launched, making him the default exercise leader.

According to the overhead, the man was bearing down on him fast while the other held his position looking for a line on Randi.

Smith tried to slide farther into the water, but couldn’t control his body anymore. How long had it been. A minute? More? Could he die from doing this? Would he even care at this point?

The approaching man slowed and he heard a garbled voice — undoubtedly he was calling to his companion, confused as to what he was doing stopped by the streambank and the erratic output of his unit.

“Randi…On my mark, break cover and go straight at the guy shooting at you. Then turn west and keep going full speed. You’ll run right into the guy coming my way.”

“Are you nuts?” came her unsurprising reply. “I’ve already been grazed once. I can’t—

“Do what I say!” he choked out as he highlighted both the men’s icons and told the network that they’d been killed in the exercise. Their Merges temporarily blinded and deafened them to simulate their deaths.

“Now! Go!”

Randi Russell heard, but didn’t comply. Smith sounded completely out of it and the bastard tracking her would be incapable of missing the kind of target he was asking her to present.

“Go!” he shouted again and this time she did, taking a leap of faith into the open. She ran full-speed in the direction of the shooter, teeth grinding against each other as she waited for the inevitable round that would kill her.

Instead, she found the shooter on his knees reaching desperately for something behind him on his belt. Figuring that there was no point in looking a gift horse in the mouth, she fired two rounds center of mass and another into the man’s face as she passed. Smith had once again pulled a rabbit from his hat.

It took only a few seconds to come up on the second man, who was also on his knees, but with his Merge in his hand. He heaved it into the woods and was bringing his rifle around when she fired a shot that penetrated his lightweight helmet and tore away most of the top of his head.

“Both men are down!” she said into her throat mike, adjusting her trajectory to take her toward the stream.

“Jon?”

She burst through the bushes, immediately sweeping her rifle toward a camo-clad man lying on his side at the edge of the water. The knife sticking out of his neck suggested he was no longer a threat and she ran to Smith, who was lying half submerged in the stream.

“Jon?” she said, grabbing the back of his hair and pulling his face out of a pool of vomit. No response.

When she rolled him on his back, his eyes fluttered open and she saw the Merge he was holding against his stomach. He tried to throw it, like the man she’d just killed, but it only went about six inches. She picked it up and hurled it into the trees.

“Jon? Jon!” His skin was dead-white and freezing cold to the touch. “Talk to me. Are you hit?”

He shook his head weakly as the sound of a helicopter became audible. Randi grabbed him by the hands and began dragging him to cover, but didn’t make it before the chopper came overhead and a powerful spotlight illuminated them.

She released him and swung her rifle into the blinding glare, but then stopped when an amplified voice overpowered the beat of the rotors. “Randi! Hold your fire!”

The copter swung in a slow arc, looking for a place to land, and she dropped to her knees, taking Smith’s head in her lap. “Hang on, Jon. The cavalry’s here.”