Strong Light of Day (20 page)

“I'm listening, Doc.”

 

43

M
IDLAND,
T
EXAS

“Life's about the future, S., not the past,” Calum Dane told Pulsipher, trying to sound convincing as they climbed out of the Suburban in the company of three other plainclothes security men. “That's why we're here today. I understand a breakthrough has been made.”

The parking lot on South County Road, off Interstate 20 in Midland, sat adjacent to a flat-roofed warehouse slab of a building that had once been used by a now-bankrupt distributor of industrial plumbing parts. Once emptied out and refurbished, its nearly ten thousand feet of open space was perfect for another of Dane Corp's latest pursuits. In addition, its isolated location and fenced perimeter made it easy to secure and kept the locals away—a key component, given the secretive nature of the ongoing research and development going on inside, virtually nonstop.

Dane considered it no small irony that buying the building for a relative song represented a kind of homecoming, since the land was located in what had once been the same county as the farm his family sharecropped. If he squinted, maybe he'd be able to see the pauper's grave where he'd buried his father, a straight shot across the flat stretch of parched land to the south.

The fifth technical team he'd hired to make his latest technological dream a reality had phoned that morning insisting they had big news to report, insisting that they meant it this time. Dane sincerely hoped so. The profit projections of this particular Dane Corp spin-off were staggering, not to mention the ancillaries and fresh market share this new venture would bring the company.

If it worked, which so far hadn't proven to be the case.

His investors and corporate team told him he was crazy, when Dane told them he was branching off into the video game industry. Of course, people had said the same thing when he bought up millions of acres of mineral rights for supposedly dry oil wells, now lined with pumpjacks for as far as the eye could see. Or when he built the largest petrochemical plant in the country, which had reaped billions of dollars in profit worldwide from the production of agricultural supplies and pesticides.

Dane had learned not to listen to them.

He'd gotten the idea while attending an annual electronics and technology convention in Las Vegas. There he noticed that the biggest crowds by far were attracted to the next generation in video gaming, multiplayer and three-dimensional graphics. There was even a less-elaborate display by Samsung of a room-based gaming system in which players found themselves confronted by life-size figures springing from what the company called “electronic wallpaper” displays. It may have been the next step in virtual reality, but it left Dane impressed more by the graphics than by what was essentially a standard gaming experience played out between walls instead of on a big screen. A letdown, in other words.

But it gave him an idea.

“Impossible,” one expert said.

“Come back in twenty years,” another told him.

“Twenty years and a billion dollars,” surmised a third.

“I've got the billion dollars,” Dane said. “But not twenty years.”

After four other teams had spent various fortunes building systems with more kinks and breakdowns than functionality, Dane found the Bass brothers, twins generally regarded as outcast rebels in the gaming industry. Utterly identical save for a mole on the cheek of one, with matching wild shocks of curly red hair, the twins, though in their midtwenties, still dressed the same and remained fond of completing each other's thoughts.

“Far out, man,” said Frank Bass.

“Deep,” added Fred, “truly deep.”

“But can you do it?” Dane said, explaining where he'd gotten the idea, after they'd scribbled their names on a confidentiality agreement without reading it.

“Fucking A we can,” from Frank.

“We'll nail this bastard,” Fred added.

“Start with the wallpaper thing—

“And build from there. Build you something truly immersive.”

“Not like what you saw at the tech shit show,” Frank explained.

“That was based on this dome-shaped system, covered with projectors, wall to wall,” Fred picked up. “Uses surround sound, augmented reality—”

“And other technologies to fabricate a real world. Emphasis on ‘fabricate'—”

“Because there's no real interaction between players and figures.”

“That's total immersion.”

“What we intend to build for you.”

That led to the challenge of moving the characters off the wall by creating artificially intelligent wallpapers that were expanded to include the floors and ceiling. Dozens and dozens more projectors, light-refracting mirrors, and display tubes needed to be added to the mix. All built from scratch at a mind-numbing cost and all controlled by a supercomputer capable of a trillion computations per second, at an even more mind-numbing cost.

Dane never flinched, never blanched. He was building something the world had never seen before. If the proprietary technology worked, the profits would be staggering—as well as unregulated in any respect whatsoever. The video game industry was the Wild West of business, the ancillaries and international arena alone turning the potential from vast to unlimited.

The problem was, every time the Bass twins surmounted one obstacle, another surfaced.

“This artificial intelligence is for shit, man,” was Fred's analysis.

“You got a hundred thousand permutations for every movement and action,” Frank added. “A hundred code writers working twenty-fours a day would take a century to write that.”

“You've got a year,” Dane told them. “So long as you tell me it can be done. So long as you tell me you can do it.”

“Fuck yeah!” the brothers said in unison.

 

44

M
IDLAND,
T
EXAS

The solution the Bass brothers came up with was to rely more on the AI software, not less, to the point that the life-size characters game players would actually be interacting with would utilize learned behavior in their responses. The initial test results after nine months of round-the-clock code writing were incredible, sometimes, and incredibly frustrating at other times. The intensity of the initial realism needed to be dialed back a bit, including turning the surround sound down a notch and making the bad guys less “frigging ugly,” as one of the Bass brothers put it. Dane wasn't sure which.

“We got three demonstrations for you,” Frank said, after greeting him inside the Midland warehouse that had become the brothers' personal electronic playground.

Fred looked up from a laptop that would be controlling the basic game elements in the sprawling open space that had once been jam-packed with distribution fulfillment stations. “
Man of War, Titans of Terra,
and
History Comes Alive.
”

“Talk to your favorite historical figure.”

“Tonto inside an authentic tepee, smoking peyote.”

“Tonto wasn't real, Fred.”

“He wasn't?”

“Anyway,” Frank picked up, “call it the ultimate school field trip.”

“We can put the game on demo—”

“Or give you a gun so you can play along,” Frank explained, unslinging a futuristic, full-size rifle.

“I think I'll pass,” Dane told them. “A demo will do.”

“Far out, man,” said Fred from behind his laptop. “Fasten your seatbelt.”

An instant later the open floor space went totally dark, only to be pierced by a million slivers of light an instant later. And then life-size soldiers appeared in full battle gear, off to fight insectlike beings who'd invaded Earth. Even though they were projections, their artificial intelligence allowed them to skirt around the three visitors to their domain, instead of passing right through them.

“They even appear to acknowledge you,” Frank noted to Calum Dane.

“What do you mean, ‘appear to'?” Dane asked that brother.

“It's almost like they're self-aware,” the other brother answered. “A fringe benefit of the AI code we wrote.”

“Which brings us to the demo,” Frank picked up. “That was just a graphics showcase. Utterly rudimentary.”

“And here we go with the main event,” Fred followed in rhythm, starting to work the keyboard.

Predictably, the primary lighting went dark, a fluorescent haze that would soon birth the game dynamic.

“Let's start with
Man of War,
” Fred continued.

“Get ready to be immersed,” his twin brother said, as Fred hit a final key.

But nothing happened.

“Like I said,” Frank groped, “get ready to—”

And then
something
happened. The warehouse confines suddenly turned from stark white to a war-ravaged and utterly decimated city landscape. The realism was so incredible that Dane imagined he could smell the decay in the air and thought that if he reached down and touched the floor it would indeed feel like concrete instead of tile. Then the life-size, incredibly realistic versions of soldiers fighting the alien enemy—hopefully soon to be accompanied by gamers paying a fortune for the experience—appeared from all directions.

The computer-drawn figures were actually beyond lifelike. Dane could see them sweating, bleeding, breathing with the heaviness of battle. The smaller ones even seemed weighed down by the weight of their extended weapons and packs. It couldn't have been more impressive.

Until the alien outdoor landscape of
Titans of Terra
suddenly claimed the warehouse, from its blacked-out windows on down.

“Oh, shit.” Fred.

“Oh, fuck.” Frank.

The soldiers from
Man of War
stopped, their images appearing confused and stopping just short of looking at each other. This as dinosaur-size monsters appeared everywhere and began attacking them.

“Bad.” Fred.

“Really fucking bad.” Frank.

And then it got worse. The
History Comes Alive
figures appeared on the scene to be besieged by the monsters of
Titans of Terra,
while the heroic humans who'd been programmed to battle them began exchanging fire with the
Man of War
rampaging characters instead. The sound was deafening, the gunfire constant and realistic to the point of expended shells clanging against the ground as futuristic assault rifles spat them out, one after the other.

Dane watched figures darting and twisting around him, close enough to reach out and touch, getting blown apart in a fashion so realistic he expected to look down to see his clothes splattered with blood. The problem was that the victims included the historical figures whose programming shouldn't have even incorporated that. But he was also conscious of Fred Bass desperately hitting keys to deactivate the system—to no avail, as if these projections had found minds of their own. He noticed Frank Bass moving to a bank of black, obelisklike structures that served as visible conduits between the game environment and the off-site supercomputer actually controlling the action. Dane watched Frank stoop down and do the simplest thing of all.

He pulled the plug. And instantly the warehouse Calum Dane had bought for three-quarters of a million dollars returned to its blank canvas—no blood, bodies, severed limbs, or any other evidence of battle whatsoever left behind. As if nothing had ever happened.

“Whoops,” Fred managed.

“That didn't go well,” Frank added.

And then Dane felt Pulsipher come up to his side. He was tempted to borrow the man's gun to shoot both twins in the head.

“There's a call from the main office, sir,” Pulsipher reported. “A Texas Ranger has requested a meeting with you about an ongoing investigation.”

“He say what this investigation was about?” Dane asked, feeling his neck hairs prickle and a slight quiver in his stomach.

He noticed the concern in Pulsipher's gaze, recalling what he'd told Dane the day before about one of the kids from the Armand Bayou field trip who'd been found in the woods.

“It's a she, sir.”

 

45

M
ARBLE
F
ALLS,
T
EXAS

Jones was already seated at the counter of the Blue Bonnet Café, fork digging into a piece of cherry pie, when Cort Wesley entered. The Blue Bonnet offered the best pie in the state, made even better by a happy hour between three and five
P
.
M
. on weekdays. Cort Wesley couldn't tell if this was Jones's first slice or his second.

“Sit down, cowboy,” he greeted. “What can I get you?”

Cort Wesley took the stool next to him. “Man, you really are out of the loop, aren't you?”

“What's that mean?”

“Those Russians you had me bug yesterday? Somebody wasted them.”

Jones stopped his next forkful halfway to his mouth. “Did I just hear you right?”

“You did. I was the one who identified the bodies.”

Jones tried not to reveal how concerned he clearly was. “Since you kicked the shit out of two of them, I'm wondering if you're a suspect.”

“What the hell's going on, Jones?”

Jones turned back to his pie but left his fork on the plate. “Don't ask me. I'm the one whose operation just got fucked.”

“And what operation is that?”

“Need-to-know basis, cowboy, and you most certainly do not need to know.”

Cort Wesley rotated his stool so he was facing Jones straight on. “Maybe we need to start this conversation again.”

Jones dabbed at his lips with a napkin. “You mind if we take a rain check on that pie? I've got some calls to make.”

He started to slide off his stool, then stopped when Cort Wesley locked a hand over his knee, pinching just enough.