The Gaming Outpost

I woke in a familiar alley in Philadelphia, but it was thankfully daytime. A long time ago, I had met a vampire when I walked out of this alley. Wondering what I would see, I stepped with forced casualness out into the deserted street.



Small signs on nearby buildings stated “For sale!”; “Auction April 14, 2015, no reserve.”; “Tenants wanted, cheap!”. They were artistic; the design done with more advanced computers and printers than I had known. But they were flags of surrender all the same.



Flocks of birds flapped upward, and grass grew in a crack in the middle of the street, and a faint honking assured me of human life somewhere in the dusty metropolis. Maybe this was an alternate reality where Gavin the Vampire had gotten his way, and destroyed Humanities faith in the Gods and the Creator which had been their best weapon against the vampires.



I turned toward the honking noise, and set out walking. A certain eeriness had me looking over my shoulder occasionally as if someone was watching me. Haunted cities can do that to you.



So I checked my skills. A simple mental focus on a piece of ragged plastic did not cause it to move, or anything. A whistletone spell did not summon it to me. But it did someone something else.



More birds soared skyward, and then a stop sign at the end of the road changed its message. I gawked for a second at the outdoor computer screen.



“Stop in place. Do not move. Make no attempt to communicate or signal in any way. Resistance will be met with lethal force.” The sign said in English, and then Spanish, Arabic, Kanjii script, pictographs, and finally American Sign Language. It then recycled itself. Even though the message was plain and shown only for a moment, I felt compelled to keep staring at it, and I caught it all the first time. I read fast, but not that fast.



A faint buzzing to my left, and with my peripheral vision, I saw a two foot long double bladed helicopter. It carried twin turrets for some sort of miniaturized gatling gun. One was on top, and the other was on the bottom, and both were trained on me.



More buzzing could be heard to my right, and above, behind, and now I saw one of these creatures full on. It looked menacing. And it moved with the delicate precision and deadliness of a skilled fencer.



I had no magic or psionics. Rather desperately, I tried to mentally access my Lekostian cybernetics, but they blandly proclaimed a “high-order error” back to me, and referred me to tech support if I had any questions. Seeing as tech support was dozens of light years and many universes away, that seemed unhelpful.



So I stood there sweating and then getting angry, and then cooling off both phycically and mentally as the minutes ticked by.



Finally, a van drove around the corner, and a door opened in the side.



“Get in.” The former stop sign instructed.



Once inside, I noticed how heavily everything had been constructed. This was a bomb-mobile used for transporting active explosives, I surmised.



We eventually came to a stop somewhere, and the door opened. A pleasant female voice invited me to step out into the corridor and to leave my backpack behind. I did, and I found one door which I rather resignedly took since I did not want Them to get nervous or irritated. Them might decide to express that feeling.



The room had an uncomfortable raw edge, and it smelled of claustrophobic security which its hundred by fifty foot size did little to diminish. It was obviously durable beyond almost anything I had seen except for some of the creations of really advanced cultures.



“The charges against you are terrorism, illegal immigration, possesion of a fusion device commonly known as a nuclear bomb. What say you?” Blared from a speaker on the wall.



“Not guilty, um, not really my fault, and the plasma cannon is a sub-crtical mass energy system enabled to temporarily achieve fusion levels, but on its worse day, it only would pack the explosive power of a hundred pounds of TNT which is significant, but hardly in the range of a nuclear device.”



A whirring noise sounded which might be only for my benefit.



“Found guilty of being an illegal alien, and possessing a high volume of explosive material. These two in conjuntion merit death. May God or whichever deity you worship, or choose not to worship have mercy on your soul, if you have one.”



Another whirring as a pipe with a nozzle end rose from the floor. I stood in a gas chamber. And so I prepared to fight.



Primitive compared to my Lekostian cybernetics, but still my extendable fingernails had their uses. I scraped a chunk of concrete up with a fingernail, and frantically tried to dice it into dust which I would add my spit to, and insert the mass of dirt as a stopper into the nozzle.



“Sentence suspended due to needs of investigation.” Blared from the wall, and the deathpipe retreated back into the floor.



A door on the far side of the room opened, and a general flanked by two heavily armed bodyguards in black with a wide array of weapons stashed in their harnesses came in.



“Get the gentleman a seat, and something to drink. Coffee?”



“Coca-cola if you have it.” I responded shakily as the adrenalin left my body. He nodded genially from across the room. And soon some attendants had a table and chairs for us, and my coke. It was classic good cop/bad cop.



This knowledge did not save me from a surge of gratitude for being treated like a human being.



“So, who are you?”



I considered the question for a moment, and then shrugged. No doubt they had sensors on me at the moment, but even if I could muster the psi focus to fiddle with my body’s reactions, that would likely only mean they went to the sodium penthothal that sooner. I could suppress my reactions, but not make a convincing fake over a number of hours.



“Call me Taduesz. I am a verser, an extradimensional. An American.”



“Really?” He invited me to go on, and I let the silence stretch for a bit. He conceded with good grace which was easy as he held the high card, a black ace of spades with my name on it.



Speaking to the table brought up pictures of an alley from orbit that appeared empty, and then poof, there I was. It was the nightmare of many a verser. A global scan with very fast reaction time. Other versers had told me of people showing up to meet them, but unless directly summoned this was the quickest reaction I had heard of.



“You are very good, very thorough.”

“Paranoiad as all get out, you meant to say.” He responded, and I smiled.

“I figured that was understood.” I said, and he laughed. See we were all good buddies here. The soldiers who had unobtrusively never let the muzzles of their guns off me chuckled as well. My opinion of the organization went up. Most low-level shooters did not cultivate a sense of humor for prisoners. I added subtlety to their list of attributes.



“Of course, your story is impossible. We want to know how you developed a stealth technology for terrorist infiltration. Your target, allies, sponsor, nationality, the usual.” He said with casual cool that was a threat.

“Yeah, and we might even let you choose which Hostage City gets it in the teeth.” One soldier hissed with a shocking venom.

The general waved him down.

“Now, no need for us to go bomb a couple square blocks of Damascus or Cairo yet. Taduesz here could decide to be very reasonable and save the taxpayers the trouble.”



I thought for a second. And then very slowly, I reached down to my ankle for the money wallet I strapped there.



Pulling it off in exzaggerated slow motion, I pulled out a coin apparently made of obsidian.



“Have your boys and girls carbon date it. And x-ray it. And then put it next to an isolated computer while in some bright light.”

He took it and asked what it would do. I smiled, and asked for a cot. Frustrated, they left, and my cot was sent in which was another good one in their favor. It would have been easy to justify not giving me one. Despite their harshness, I was starting to like these guys.



The coin-shape contained a 1995 nickel, a small pin of radioactive uranium that had decayed to a much smaller level due to the enormous time span the little time capsule had undergone. I had it near Tau Ceti from some alien selling “Genuine Extinct Earth Artifacts.” And it held a terribly simple and rugged computer clock powered by the radiation. The clock had been counting for over a billion years.



Within the hour, they were back to me with a group of excited and angry scientists, and the general and several more guards. I knew why the scientists were upset. I had turned over their favorite theories of the Universe. So they called me a hoaxer, and a charlatan with one breath as with another, they begged me to explain. Humans are not very rational in case you had not noticed.



“Wait until they look at my other stuff.” I said to the general over the clamor.

“They already are.” He replied with a kind of helpless look at the pushing and shoving and hysterical questions.

I gave them some advice on what not to do with my equipment, and I gave the scientists enough red meat to chew on.



“We are going to want the rest of your data. Even if it turns out to be complete fraud, my chief scientists say that it is a very interesting fraud which could shed useful light on a number of issues.” The general said.

This was an interesting way of looking at it. My respect for these people might have grown. Either they were off the deep end with that theory, or they had some theoretical framework for using lies to find the truth. Or maybe, it was as simple as the notion that the best lie has truth in it, and they thought they could sort out the wheat from the chaff.



“One of the implications of what I said was that death is not such a problem for me. I don’t like it, but its bearable.”

“So?” The general said as I walked up to him with my hands behind my back.

“So, stop threatening me with an empty hand. If you want my help, convince me.” In a way, it was me that was bluffing. They could gas me, and that notion sent the raging heebie-jeebies going up and down my spine.

“You want the nickel tour in less than a billion years?” He said with an attempt at humor.

“Not just the facility, the world.”

“I’ll give you my view on it which is SatCom’s view.” He replied, and ushered me out of the room. His guard objected, but the general replied calmly. This was a command decision. If I was who I said I was, then the downside risk of me killing him, or destroying the facility somehow was worth the potential upside.

With this, I figured they were not letting me out in the open air where I might spray an aerosol full of super Ebola.



We went up in a glass elevator to his command center. Glass walls looked out on green fields. And then a wall would change and a picture from somewhere in the world would flash up for the merest second. But somehow, I remembered every detail without trying.

“Turn down the focus, our visitor is overloading.” The general ordered, and the pictures lost some vividness.

“Advances in understanding of neuro-physiology coupled with new ‘monitors’.” One guy explained to me as I walked up to examine one more closely, and I realized that everyone who might need to know who I was in the large room already did. Their internal memo system was formidable.

“The green field is real. Studies showed that pictures of a green field were not nearly as pschyolically beneficial as being able to look through glass straight at it.” A woman explained. I was getting briefed.



So I tossed out a couple words to guide the briefing.

“Hostage Cities.”

“Damascus, Cairo, PA area, Lebanon, Baghdad, Riyhadh are the primary targets for retributive strikes.”

“If we are struck by a national of one of those states, or it can be reliably proven that one of those states or people inside it had a hand in financing, training, recovery, or support in any way, then we make a response to the city in question.”



I was aghast.

“That’s horrible.”

“Yes, it is.” The general said re-entering the discussion. “So is bombing our people. We merely require that the govenrments of the Unstable Region enforce their own laws.”

“Which you made them pass.”

“Yes.” The general said with a flinty stare. There was no apology in them.

“Its either that or let them bomb us at will, or totally destroy them, or totally subjugate them by the methods of Vlad Tepes, public mass torture, because we would have to be harsher than their own governments to get them to submit to us directly.”

“So you are the Overlords of the planet?”

“Yes, again.” The general said wearily. “Look, we tried other ways. We tried to have a world order, but for reasons that still provoke a lot of arguement as to whose fault it was, this did not happen. No crying over spilt milk.”

“So, how successful is it?”

“Not bad, we had one serious smallpox scare in Atlanta last year, but the cities are emptying out nicely. We contained it with only five hundred casualties.” A smile lighted his face as he described a ‘victory’.



“Why was Philadelphia so empty?”

“You’re in the outskirts of the old town now. Turned back to the forrest mostly.” Someone commented as he flickered slightly. Then I saw others flicker. I was surrounded by holograms. The guards and the general were real, as was about ten percent of the rest in the room.



A soldier chuckled.

“I’m starting to believe this guy, General. He just twigged onto the telecomuters.”



“Most of our workforce is telecommuters which is driven by the fiber optic landlines laid down by the Defence Communications Act of 2004 which did for telecommuters what the interstate highways did for the 1950′s. Its easier on everyone. No commuting.

But the military reason is that a large metropolis is a too tempting target for terrorists. The largest city in the nation has a million people, and it is losing a thousand people a day. We hope to speed that up. People either live by themselves as the New Hermits on five hundred acre of no other people and use a ‘copter or a Humvee to get in and out, or they live in stretches with a house on a road every couple hundred feet, or they live in villages legally limited to ten thousand people. Most of those top out at about thirty-five hundred.”



“It makes it hard for a terrorist to do serious damage, and of course, most of these villages have single roads in and out so that a plague can be easily contained with two heli-lifted APCs.” A major said as he flickered past.



Why, I wanted to ask, but I did not want to ask. The general answered my unspoken question.



“L.A. nuke. At first we thought the Chinese had done it. They had threatened enough times.”

I nodded for I remembere in my original world, the Chicoms threatening on several occasions to nuke the West Coast.

“But our scientists quickly determined that it was a crude weapon that was ‘lucky’ to have worked at all. And we traced the bomb material to Arab sources, and to a group of terrorists in Syria. So we napalmed the countryside for a dozen miles in every direction. But it was not enough. They had died, five thousand terrorists, and they were supposed to be happy according to the Poisen Swamp’s media.”



“Arab media.” A lady explained. “Makes our worst yellow journalism in our history look downright responsible.”



“We bombed Damascus, rather harshly, even though we did not firebomb it. And we caught that butcher, Hafaz Assad who had sympathized with us in English, while he in Arabic rooted the crowds on. He acted like we were fools. In under a day, we put in a new government. And we told them the rules. And we told everyone else the rules.”



“There was plenty of support, reaching nearly forty percent for turning the whole ME into green glass. Anger and panic and determination to never ever let it happen again ruled the nation. Things got hairy for a while.” The general said.



“What the general is too modest to mention is his Congressional Medal of Honor for …”

“That will be enough.” The general barked with fury riding his face.

“No, sir, it is not. He needs to understand.” A woman said, and the rest of the room agreed.

“I put down a coup d’ etat by certain high-ranking officers with the aid of that piece of garbage M-16.”



I watched a video recording of a stone-faced colonel walk into a bar where a dozen armed men of high authority conspired, and try to arrest them. And in the ensuing fight take enough wounds to kill a man twice over, and have his gun go balky, and still prevail. It was in black and white; the product of a anti-robber video.



The general looked weary to the bone.

“You may not be able to use everything I have, but I will offer what help I can unstintingly.” I said as the room erupted into cheers. Somehow they knew of the advanced tech I had, and the possibility of changing the world.



Perhaps, if I could make them feel safe enough, they would venture to drain the swamp rather than simply put up seawalls against its toxic tide.



Taduesz