New Frontiers (25 page)

Which opens some intriguing possibilities …

 

DUEL IN THE SOMME

 

THE CRISIS CAME
when Kelso got on my butt in that damned Red Baron triplane of his and started shooting the crap out of my Spad. I mean, I knew this was just a simulation, it wasn't really real, but I could see the fabric on my wings shredding, and the plane started shaking so hard my teeth began to rattle.

I kicked left rudder and pushed on the stick as hard as I could. Wrong move. The little Spad flipped on its back and went into a spin, diving toward the ground.

It's only a simulation! I kept telling myself. It's not real! But the wind was shrieking and the ground spinning around and around and coming up fast and I couldn't get out of the spin and simulation or not I puked up my guts.

I knew I was going to die. Worse, Kelso would get to take Lorraine to the ski weekend and tell her all about what a wuss I am. While they were in bed together, most likely. Rats!

How did I get myself into this duel? All because of Lorraine, that's how. Well, that's not really true. I can't blame her. I went into it with my eyes wide open. I even thought this would be my best chance to beat Kelso.

Yeah. Fat chance.

I mean, it was all weird from the beginning.

There I was, taking the biggest risk I'd ever taken, sitting at my workstation and using my BlackBerry to text message sweet Lorraine:
GOT RSRVS FR ASPEN COMING WKND. JOIN ME? EL ZORRO.

I mean, everybody in the company was after Lorraine. She was beautiful, smart, elegant, kind, beautiful, sweet, independent, and beautiful.

Me, I was just one of the nerds in the advanced projects department, a geekboy stuck in one of those cubicles like Dilbert. Not that I was repulsive or tongue-tied. I mean, I wasn't as slick and handsome as Kelso, but I didn't crack mirrors or frighten babies with my looks. Lorraine always smiled at me whenever we passed each other in the corridor. I sat with her in the cafeteria a few times and we had very pleasant conversations.

She even called me Tom. Not Thomas. Tom. I mean, even in school everybody called me by my last name, Zepopolis. The few friends I had called me Zep. When I first started working at the company guys like Kelso called me Zeppelin, but one glance from Lorraine and I started dieting. She even complimented me on how I was slimming down. Talk about incentive!

But I didn't have the nerve to sign my real name to the invitation I sent her. I thought it might add an air of mystery to the invite, maybe get her thinking romantic thoughts and wondering who her secret admirer might be. Zorro, the masked swordsman. The dashing hero. Yeah, right.

Kelso saw right through me in a microsecond.

“Zepopolis,” he snapped, leaning over the top of my cubicle wall. He was tall enough to stand head and shoulders above the cubicle's flimsy partition.

I jumped like I'd been shot. Dropped my no-fat doughnut on the floor, nearly sloshed the coffee out of my Star Wars insulated mug.

“Yes, sir!” I blurted, leaping to my feet as I swiveled my chair around to face him. Kelso was the department head, a position he'd obtained by hard work, intelligence, and a powerful personality. Plus the fact that his father was founder, CEO, and board chairman of Kelso Electronics, Inc.

See, Kelso was after Lorraine, major league. Flowers, gifts, taking her out dancing, to the theater—he even sat through an entire opera with her, according to the office rumor mill. So far, she had been pleasant to him, polite and friendly, but that's as far as it went. Again, according the office vibes.

I figured she might welcome a little competition, a little mystery and romance. I figured I might even have a chance with her. Kelso figured otherwise.

He looked me over with a jaundiced eye. “You the hump who sent that weird invitation to Lorraine?” he demanded.

I could have denied it and that would be the end of it. I could have admitted it and apologized and
that
would be the end of it.

Instead I drew myself up to my full five-nine and said, “That's right. I'm waiting for her answer.”

“Her answer is no,” Kelso said, with some heat.

I heard myself say, “I'll have to hear that from her.” I mean, I
talked back
to him!

Kelso just stared at me for about half a minute (seemed like half a year), his fingers gripping the partition so hard they left permanent dents. Kelso was big enough to snap me in half; he played handball every lunch hour (for him, lunch was two hours, of course). He took boxing lessons at a downtown gym. He even played polo, for crying out loud.

His voice went murderously low, “I'm telling you, Greek geek, Lorraine isn't going on any ski weekend with you or Zorro or anybody else except me.”

“Don't I have something to say about that?”

We both turned at the sound of her voice, and there was Lorraine, like a vision of an angel dressed in hip-hugging jeans and a blouse that clung to her like Saran Wrap. She was standing in the entrance of my cubicle, her beautiful face set in a very soulful expression.

I sputtered at the sight of her. “Lorraine, I—”

“Are you El Zorro?” she asked, a slight smile breaking out.

“He's El Deado if he's not careful,” Kelso growled.

Lorraine arched her brows and asked, “Are you two fighting over me?”

“It wouldn't be much of a fight,” Kelso sneered. “Two blows struck: I hit Zorro and he hits the floor.”

“Neanderthal,” I heard myself say. That's stupid! I told myself. Don't get him sore enough to start punching!

“Geek,” he replied.

Lorraine said, “I won't have you fighting. I'm not a prize to be awarded to the winner. Besides, it's no way to settle this.”

That's when the Great Idea hit me.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What if we fight a duel? An actual duel, like they did in the old days?”

“A duel?” she asked.

Kelso grouched, “Dueling's been outlawed for two hundred years. More.”

I pulled out my trump card. “But what if we fight a duel in a virtual reality simulation?”

“Virtual reality?” Lorraine echoed.

“Simulation?” Kelso's heavy brows knit together. “Like we use to train pilots?”

“Yeah. We've got VR systems that give the user a complete three-dimensional simulation: you see, touch, hear a world that exists only in the computer's chips.”

“And it's interactive, isn't it? You can manipulate that world while you're in it,” Lorraine chimed in. I told you she was smart as well as gorgeous.

“That's right,” I said enthusiastically. “You can move in the simulated environment and make changes in it.”

Kelso was frowning puzzledly. “You mean we could fight a duel in a virtual reality setting…?”

“Right,” I said. “Share a VR world, whack the hell out of each other, and nobody gets really hurt.”

A slow smile crept across his devilishly handsome face. “Whack the hell out of each other. Yeah.”

I didn't like the sound of that.

“Winner takes all?” Kelso asked.

I nodded.

“Oh no you don't,” Lorraine snapped. “I'm not some prize you win in a video game. I don't want anything to do with this macho bullflop!”

And she flounced off without a backward look at us, her long dark hair bouncing off her shoulders. We both stared at her as she just about stomped down the corridor.

Rats, I thought. Here I wanted her to fall for the romance of it all, and all she did was get sore. Double rats.

I shrugged. “Well, it was an idea, anyway.”

“A good idea,” said Kelso.

“Whattaya mean?”

He gave me a narrow-eyed look. “This is between you and me, Zepopolis.”

“But Lorraine—”

“You and me,” Kelso repeated. “We fight our duel and the loser swears he won't go after Lorraine ever again.”

“But she—”

“Lorraine won't know anything about it. And even if she does, what can she do? I'll whip you in the duel and you stop bothering her. Got it?”

“Got it,” I muttered. But I thought that maybe—just maybe—I'd beat Kelso's smug backside and he'd be the one to stop sniffing after Lorraine.

So that night, after even the most gung-ho of the techies had finally gone home, Kelso and I went down to the VR lab and started programming the system there for our duel. I knew the lab pretty well; I used it all the time to check out the cockpit simulations we created for the Air Force and Navy. It wouldn't take much to modify one of the sims for our duel, I thought.

The lab was kind of eerie that late at night: only a couple of desk lights on, pools of shadows everywhere else. The big simulations chamber was like an empty metal cave, except for the wired-up six-degree chairs in its middle.

Kelso and I talked over half a dozen ideas for scenarios—a medieval joust with lances and broadswords, an old-fashioned pistol duel aboard a Mississippi steamboat, jungle warfare with assault rifles and hand grenades, even a gladiatorial fight in ancient Rome.

I slyly suggested an aerial dogfight, World War I style. I didn't tell Kelso that I'd spent hours and hours playing WWI air battle computer games.

“You mean, like the Red Baron and Snoopy?” he asked, breaking into a wolfish grin.

“Right.”

“Okay. I'll be the Red Baron.”

I tried to hide my enthusiasm. “That makes me Snoopy, I guess.”

“Flying a doghouse!” Kelso laughed.

“No,” I replied as innocently as I could muster. “I'll fly a Spad XIII.”

“Okay with me.” Kelso agreed too easily, but I didn't pay any attention to it at the time.

“We'll start with an actual scenario out of history,” I suggested, “a battle between the Red Baron's squadron and a British squadron, over the Somme sector in—”

“A duel in the Somme!” Kelso punned. “Get it? Like that old movie,
Duel in the Sun
.” He laughed heartily at his own witticism.

Me, I smiled weakly, disguising my elation. I had him where I wanted him. I had a chance to beat him, a damned good chance. So I thought.

It wasn't cosmically difficult to plug the WWI scenario I had used so often into the VR circuitry. I got the specs on the Spad XIII and the Fokker Dr. 1 triplane easily enough through the Web. The tough part was to get the VR system to accept two inputs from two users at the same time without shorting itself into a catatonic crash. I spent all night working on it. Kelso quit around midnight.

“I've got to get my sleep and be rested for the weekend's exertions,” he said as he left. “With Lorraine.”

He went home. I continued programming, but my mind filled with a beautiful fantasy of Lorraine and me together in the ski lodge, snuggling under a colorful warm quilt.

That was before I found out that Kelso flew
real
airplanes and was a member of a local stunt flying organization. Good thing I didn't know it then; I'd have slit my throat and gotten it over with.

So the next night, after a quick takeout salad (with low-cal dressing), I headed down to the VR lab. I bumped into Kelso, also heading for the sim chamber. With Lorraine! They had eaten dinner together, he informed me with a vicious smile. And there were almost a dozen techies trailing along behind them.

“But I thought—”

“You thought I didn't know,” Lorraine said to me. “Like anybody can keep a secret in this jungle gym for nerds.”

That hurt.

“I still think you two are acting like a couple of macho creeps,” she said. “But if you're going to go through with this duel the least I can do is watch you making Looney Tunes of yourselves.”

The geek squad behind her and Kelso got a laugh out of that as they followed after us down to the VR lab. The word about our duel had well and truly leaked out.

“We're going to have a great time in Aspen,” Kelso said to Lorraine.

She didn't reply.

He was walking down the corridor at her side. I was on her other side, all three of us striding toward the VR lab like soldiers on parade. The rest of the onlookers shambled along behind us. I mean, techies aren't the slickest-looking people. They looked like a collection of pudgy unwashed refugees and smelled like stale pepperoni pizza.

Lorraine finally spoke. “Just because you two heroes have decided to fight this duel over me doesn't mean that I'll go anywhere with either of you.”

My heart clutched beneath my ribs. She's found out about the duel! If she backs out of this, what's the sense of fighting it?

“You've got to!” I blurted.

“No I don't,” she insisted. “This duel is between the two of you. You guys and your macho fantasies. Don't include me in it.”

Kelso isn't the sharpest pencil in the box, but he quickly said, “You're right, Lorraine. This is between the Greek geek and me. The loser stops bothering you.” He looked down at me. “Right, Zepopolis?”

I looked at Lorraine. The expression on her face was unfathomable. I mean, she looked sort of irritated, intrigued, sad, and excited all at the same time. I can handle computer programming at its most arcane, but I couldn't figure out what was going through Lorraine's mind. I mean, if she didn't want to have anything to do with our duel, why'd she come down to the VR lab with us?

Well, we got to the lab. While the rest of the guys leaned over my shoulder and made seventeen zillion suggestions on how to do it better, I powered up the simulation program and checked it out. Kelso stood off in a shadowy corner with Lorraine. No touchy games between them; she was watching me intently while Kelso fidgeted beside her.

It was time to enter the simulations chamber. Kelso marched in like a conquering hero and picked up the helmet waiting on his chair.

“Gloves first,” I said.

“Yeah. Right.”

So we wormed our hands into the sim gloves. Their insides were studded with sensors, and a slim optical fiber line trailed from them to the connectors built into the chamber wall. They felt fuzzy, tingly.