A Time for Heroes

by Edward M. Lerner

Travis Logan was a reader, a movie buff, a TV addict, and a gamer. In short, he was a lover of stories—but not just any story held his interest. He reveled in grand sagas, epic explorations, daunting quests, and perilous adventures. The more larger than life, the more fascinating the story—

And the more Travis’s own mundane existence suffered by comparison.

In the stories he loved, dire circumstances forged ordinary people into heroes. The situation might be cruel or capricious, the work of an implacable enemy or of vast, impersonal forces. A debilitating illness. A car crash. Wartime horrors. Zombie plagues. A lover in peril.

It could be anything. But it had to be something.

Alas, for as far back as Travis could remember, he had had no such formative moment. There was no deep, meaningful lesson to define him. In all his humdrum life, there had been no opportunity to seize, no peril to overcome, no noble sacrifice to make, no grand challenge to which he might valiantly have risen. The one incident involving Travis that might fairly be called seminal was, quite literally, seminal, and his parents’ experience rather than his own.

No, Travis had never had a life-altering moment. Perhaps that was why his life was so commonplace and seemingly of no account.

The thing about life-altering moments is, they do not often announce themselves…

Mortars roared and the ground shook beneath Travis. Rock chips flew from the boulders behind which he crouched, as bullets screamed past. Tendrils of mist writhed overhead, lurid with crisscrossing laser-sight beams. His hands hurt from clutching a rifle so tightly.

This was the best game ever.

Here was far more real than the sensory-immersion tank in which Travis knew himself to truly be. His senses were alive, alert to the smallest detail. Hands down, this was the best virtual-reality environment he had ever experienced.

He looked around. His uniform, even the armored vest, was all tans and greens: forest camouflage. Every blade of grass was distinct—except, he noted, when looking out the corner of his eye. The clouds far overhead were like that, too, and the texture of the boulders: details fading on the periphery to conserve computing power. Done right, the optimization shouldn’t have been visible. It needed tweaking.

But he wasn’t here to critique the graphics or sound effects so authentic that he felt them in his bones or the imaginary pebble so convincingly digging into his butt. His job was putting the game through its paces. Playing.

Only this hardly felt like play. A mortar round landed, the closest yet, shaking the ground. Dirt, twigs, and pebbles rained down on him. Soon the imaginary mortar would imaginarily find its target. It’s only a game, Travis told himself. Take your time. Scope things out.

Boulders ringed him. He crept toward a gap between the rocks to peek out.

Travis never saw the sniper who killed him.

Bullets whizzed overhead, as many as before. But unlike before, he was going to move. He had a mission to accomplish. He was Zorro with an M-16.

Travis ripped open vest pocket flaps, the Velcro zzps inaudible amid the gunfire. Eventually he found a little mirror on a short handle, a gadget like a dentist might use. That was new, and he smiled. You had to love online gaming. Unseen developers had added the mirror to his gear.

Carefully maneuvering the mirror between and above various boulders, he scoped out his surroundings and even spotted a few of the opposition.

His watch was busted, by a bit of ricocheting rock perhaps. He estimated the time between mortar rounds by his pulse. Call it eight seconds.

When the next round hit, Travis was on his feet while the ground still shivered. Under cover of the smoke and still-falling dirt, he dashed for the nearby woods.

A camouflaged enemy, smirking, emerged from behind a tree and shot him.

Spraying the trees with automatic-weapons fire as he ran, Travis made it safely into the woods. The enemy side kept learning—but he learned faster.

He caught his breath, standing over an enemy soldier dramatically dying. Too Hollywood, but not bad acting for an artificial intelligence. In gamer-speak, a bot. A game-playing, robotic character. That’s what all his opponents were: software.

Software embodied in graphics so—graphic—that Travis had to look away. He felt queasy. He told himself he was being ridiculous. The throbbing wounds were no more real than the characters he was here to train.

He was a pro gamer. Lots of companies brought him in-house for a day or a week before releasing a new virt game, to run a final checkout. To test, not to put too fancy a term on it, untainted by knowledge or preconceptions about the game.

But this was much more than testing, as vague as his host had been.

Scripted bots were so last century. They did what the developers instructed and no more. Watch a scripted bot for a few games and you could kill it every time. Where was the fun in that? Or the repeat customers to keep renting time in the very expensive VR tanks?

So most virts added randomness to their bots. The sniper who stood behind a tree today would almost certainly hide standing behind a different tree the next time he played. The variability made play more challenging—until, in no more than a few iterations, the gamer learned to study all the trunks at the forest’s edge.

The bot ostentatiously wheezing at Travis’s feet had lain prone behind a fallen, rotting log. Better, but still hiding behind a tree trunk. Travis looked around. This sniper could as easily lurk behind that low stacked-stone fence or down in that meandering streambed or—well, that was the point. That the gamer not be able to anticipate. A trained AI—that’s what would make this virt a moneymaker. And Travis was here to give the training.

“You’re too easy to spot among the trees,” Travis told the enemy. “The log isn’t different enough. Mix it up more. Remember that.”

With one last flamboyant shudder, the bot died. Its last gasp did not sound much like, “Thank you.”

And Travis, in the seconds before the dead bot dissolved into a puff of greasy smoke, didn’t feel much like Zorro.

I’m getting the hang of this virt, Travis decided. He was deep in the woods, well on his way to his objective, a bevy of dead enemies marking his passage. Shot, grenaded, knifed…

Of course he had died many times, too, learning to get this far.

He was running low on ammo, and he went through the pockets of the soldier dying at his feet. Travis found three ammo clips, half a dozen grenades, and a pair of binocs.

Stealing from the dying hardly felt heroic. Did the Scarlet Pimpernel ever do such a thing? Odysseus? Batman? It’s not real, Travis reminded himself. And that he would have waited for it to die, if the game software didn’t remove the body so soon after. It’s not real.

In some still, small recess of Travis’s mind, Batman rebuked, “Neither am I.”

Travis lay flat on the rough ground, binocs in hand, peering out from under a dense thicket. An enemy outpost blocked the obvious routes forward. He could try to sneak past by dark of night, but they would expect that. And the sentry he had garroted had had night-vision equipment. Others would, too.

Dark of night: When would that be? He couldn’t remember the apparent time of day he had begun playing. For that matter, he didn’t remember whether it was the same every game.

Hmm. How many times had he started over? Curious. Travis couldn’t say. Still, he couldn’t have been in the virt all that long. He’d had only a modest lunch and he wasn’t hungry.

He glanced at his virtual wrist and found his virtual watch shattered again. He shrugged. When next he died and came back, he would take better care of the chronometer.

For now, not in a mood to wait or die, he studied the terrain. There, he decided. A good place for a diversionary explosion or two. And there, an even better spot for waylaying the enemies who must come to investigate.

He crept forward to lay an ambush.

For all Travis’s progress, the objective still lay far ahead. It was all about the mission now. When, inevitably, he “died” from time to time, he returned through enemy lines with ruthless efficiency. Deaths were the price of advancement.

He disabled tripwires, bypassed sensors, and dispatched enemies, all with casual ease. A trail of bodies littered his wake. The bots learned, but not as quickly as he. If they could, this would be one hell of a game. But they were so much cannon fodder.

Soon, he would reach the target. He would destroy it. Just like in Lord of the Rings, Travis thought. No matter the odds, no matter who tries to stop me, I shall prevail.

Only why did he feel more like some cyborg terminator than like Frodo?

A bot lay at Travis’s feet. Sure, they were wily—much more so than when he had begun playing. He had learned, too. Natural intelligence still ran rings around the artificial kind.

Apart from some bruises and the rivulet of blood that ran from his torn cheek and down his neck, the prisoner looked familiar. Why wouldn’t he? The game software would have only so many faces to put on bots. Travis must have seen this face again and again.

And killed it again and again.

“You’re going to talk,” Travis said.

“No, I’m not,” the prisoner said. Hands tied behind his back, he struggled to sit up.

When he had almost succeeded, Travis planted a boot on his captive’s shoulder and knocked him down. “I need to know the route ahead. You’re going to tell me. If I come across anything that looks even the slightest bit different than what you describe”—Travis unsheathed his commando knife, its double-edged blade a wicked seven inches long—”I’ll be back.”

“Who cares?” the prisoner snapped. And then—

In a puff of smoke, he vanished.

Travis loped upslope, gliding between the trees, skirting an enemy outpost on the valley floor. His mind churned.

Bots disappeared all the time—after you killed them. Removing them was merely fancy graphics and practicality. Dead bodies everywhere would clutter the playing area and waste computing cycles. But for a live bot to vanish? That made no sense.

Unless that character wasn’t a bot.

If it wasn’t a bot, that made it… a player. A gamer. A person Travis had threatened to torture! And if one enemy was a real gamer, more would be.

Travis skidded to a halt, chest heaving, within a small stand of trees. How many gamers had he casually slaughtered? How many repeatedly?

Sure, technically he only killed software. Knowing some of his victims had people behind them felt different. Felt wrong.

It was time for a break. First thing, he’d apologize to the gamer, assuming he could track down who that had been. There must be log files on the game server. Only then did Travis realize—

He had no idea how to get out of the virt.

He sat on a fallen, mossy log, on the edge of a small clearing. Faint noises drifted his way: enemies hunting for him. He hoped they could tell him the way out.

He knew one way that did not work: dying. He had died in the game… he could not remember how many times. Or how long he had been playing. He remembered planning to check his watch when he reentered the game. He hadn’t. He glanced at his wrist.

The watch was broken. Maybe it always started that way.

He tuned out the hunt, struggling to concentrate. Exiting the virt should be a simple matter of opening his eyes. Raising the lid of the VR tank.

But his eyes were open. Here, anyway. He closed them and extended his arms into the dark. Groping in front of him, then overhead, then all around him, he felt… nothing. Beneath there was only the rough bark of the log and the cool dampness of moss. No hint of a VR immersion tank.

A part of Travis still needed to struggle onward. How else could he reach the objective? How else could he complete… his… mission?

He twitched. What, exactly, was the mission? He had no idea. He wondered if he ever had. The game, like this computer-generated valley, might go on without end.

Leaving should be the reverse of entering. He had played many VR games, in many such tanks. Only he had no recollection of getting into a tank this time. Odd.

It was surprisingly difficult to retrieve memories from right before the virt. They seemed distant, as though he had been playing for a very long time. His last pre-game recollection was, was, was…

A computer lab. VR tanks. A tall, moon-faced man, standing. It all felt less real than the virtual log on which Travis “sat.” He frowned in concentration. That man. Cav something. Cavender? Cavendish?

Cavanaugh! That was the man’s name. Alan Cavanaugh. He was Travis’s host and the company’s creative director. Cavanaugh held a helmet, dome down, like a hardhat lined with tiny silvery Lego blocks. Sensors, of course. Lots and lots of sensors. EEG on steroids.

Cavanaugh said, “I’ll explain the game in a minute. For the best experience, we’ll configure the tank especially for you.” He offered Travis the helmet. “Put this on. This will read out your ideal settings.”

Travis remembered thinking that a personally calibrated VR tank would be awesome. He remembered taking the helmet out of Cavanaugh’s hands and setting it on his head—

And appearing, dressed in camo, pinned down by enemy fire, amid a jumble of boulders.

Travis sat tailor-style on the ground in the center of a wooded glade. His hands rested on his lap, palms up and fingers interlaced. His rifle, well beyond his reach, its ammo clip removed, leaned against a jagged stump. “Let me out,” he said to the air.

No one answered. Nothing happened.

He waited, looking harmless.

Enemy troops eventually rushed into the clearing. Most were expressionless: clearly bots.

One shot Travis faster than he could ask the way out.

Out of the boulder field and across the meadow, into the woods and deep into the valley, Travis had once again left bodies in his tracks. The mayhem had nothing to do with a “mission” and everything to do with his need to hide. He had to disappear, to make the enemy spread out hunting for him.

Now he hugged a hollow in the ground, beneath a thatch of torn, tall grass. A scout approached, circling inconsequential bumps and dips in the terrain with the telltale algorithmic fussiness of a bot. Travis let it pass. Eventually a second appeared: another bot. Travis allowed it, too, to go by unmolested. And then—

Nuances of motion and stance said this was a gamer. When the prey turned his back, Travis burst out of hiding. The enemy scout stiffened as a rifle barrel prodded him in the back.

But this wasn’t an enemy, only a link to the outside world. The enemy was whoever kept Travis inside the game.

“How do I—?” Travis began to ask. Only no speech, no sound at all, came out of his mouth. The programmers had been busy again.

He was too surprised even to notice what killed him this time.

Amid a too-familiar jumble of rocks, bullets zinging overhead, mortars blasting, ground trembling, Travis considered. There was much that he remembered only imperfectly. The tastes of foods. The colors of a sunset. The clothes he had worn to the “test” session. The names of the game and gaming company were completely gone.

And yet…

He remembered enough to know he was no mere game character. Who would fill a bot with the names of kindergarten classmates, and the capitals of the fifty states, and the smell of freshly baked bread? His memories, however incomplete, were his.

Scripted bots. Randomized bots. Artificially intelligent bots. He was none of those things. What came next? No question: Naturally intelligent bots. Uploads.

Me.

Target for an ever-growing legion of players who would seek to kill him. Again, and again, and again.

In a flash of light and sound, a mortar round found him.

Rocks. Bullets. The roar of mortar rounds. Deep in thought, Travis ignored them all.

He had been copied into this game.

The real Travis would know the goal of the game. He would remember getting into a VR tank and know how to open it.

Would an uploaded copy know? Apparently not. Or rather, for the copy there was no tank. He was only bits inside a computer, the ghost within the machine. There was no door for him to open.

The mortar rounds crept closer.

For what it was worth, Travis knew when the copy—he—had been made. Personal calibration? Ha!

Was he a bootleg upload? No way. Flesh-and-blood Travis might log onto this game any time, recognize himself, and sue the company for everything it was worth. Why risk it?

No, Real Travis had agreed to this. That Travis didn’t remember the discussion only meant Cavanaugh brought it up after the copying process. Real Travis would have jumped at the chance to star in a virt—and happily collected his royalties.

Because I would have, Travis thought sadly. And I’d have been wrong.

Blam!

Clods of dirt rained down. Travis’s ears rang. His nose bled. That was close. In another round or two, inevitably, the enemy would find the range. In a few scant seconds…

He didn’t feel much like Batman, Zorro, or Frodo. He didn’t feel inspired by them. He didn’t feel like fighting, or even like moving.

Travis remembered wishing life had—even once—dealt him a real challenge. A worthy challenge. A seminal moment. The type of defining moment that forged true heroes.

Real Travis, yielding to vanity or cash, had had his seminal moment. In dooming his own upload to purgatory, Real Travis had shown himself unworthy.

And me, Travis thought. What about me? This is a seminal moment. My seminal moment. I choose to fight no more.

My hero now is Gandhi.

As the whistle of an incoming mortar shell swelled, Travis wondered how many times, and in how many uninteresting ways, he must die before the game masters ended the slaughter.

(With thanks and apologies to Jeremy.)

Content

A Time for Heroes
by Edward M. Lerner