The world exploded, and from under his cover point he wasn't too sure what was going on. He really couldn't hear much over the massive explosions from artillery that filled his vision. Fortunately, one of the collapsed houses gave some minor cover - he wasn't too sure it would hold up under the barrage, but it turned out to do so. He breathed a momentary sigh of relief - holy sh*t the artillery strike didn't kill me - before he turned to look outside.
He saw a lot of dead men in green uniforms. He saw a lot of men in grey uniforms charging.
Holy sh*t. The artillery strike didn't kill me.
The man charged, hoping he'd be able to get into the nearby house without being turned into a pulp. His heart raced. Some of the soldiers in grey took potshots, but they must have been fresh from the creches - they all missed, by the grace of God. The whizz of bullets flying past him and the zip they made as they hit everything that wasn't his six-foot tall moving target were cold comfort, however, because in the end all it means was oh cripes someone's shooting me.
He took stock in the house and waited for them to come, flicking his rifle to automatic. He didn't even bother using the scope, at this range it didn't matter. As they came he unloaded; they didn't quite seem to get the message, and continued charging. It felt surreal mowing down a squad of infantry with his rifle, for the two seconds it lasted before running out of ammo. He pulled the trigger again as another squad charged in, hearing nothing but a click.
"sh*t."
Thinking quickly, he drew his sidearm and sprayed wildly; it seemed to force everyone else into cover, buying him some time. He took a moment to stay in cover, reloading his weapons, when he heard the telltale ping of a grenade's safety lever being pulled.
"Well I guess it's f*ck me day, isn'-"
Neil Findlay ceased to talk. The last thing he saw before his screen turned black and his avatar was mutilated, was the green, rounded casing of an impact grenade about to land on the floor in front of him.
"-t it." He sat back in his chair. It had felt electrifying to play Rambo in a game where any bullet stood a reasonable chance of killing you, but just like your life at any point in Frolicking with Firearms, it never did last. He took a few moments to appreciate it before appearing back at spawn, his soldier carrying a new name.
Of course, one of his friends was nearby.
"Hey, Tycho!" The man himself turned around, and headed over. In his hands was a gun so ridiculously large
◊ that for a moment he boggled over it and completely forgot what pleasantries he was going to give. "Um... what is that?"
"Oh, this?" Tycho repeated. Given that this was a modern-day first-person shooter, and not, say, Sword Art Online, characters were far less expressive than necessary for communication. Instead of doing anything a sensible person would do, Tycho walked over to give a closer look. "I found this off a dead guy shortly before I fell back. Because dying sucks."
Neil snorted. "You telling me you wouldn't give your life for your country if asked?"
"Not for something pointless, like you do on the daily. Seriously, how many deaths will it take-"
"All of them." was the swift interjection. Tycho continued as though Neil had never spoken.
"-before you learn that being Rambo doesn't work?"
A silence ensued, broken only by the explosion that usually came from newbies accidentally hitting "Grenade" instead of "Radio" and blowing somebody else up, and the friendly fire from nearly everyone else (server rules be damned) that quickly avenged an accidental act of collateral stupidity.
Tycho stared out for a moment. "Ouch, he clipped a whole squad. They won’t be happy about that."
"I work in the internet, Tycho, I can afford to be stupid in an environment where acting dumb is not punishable with loss of your livelihood." Today had been a tough shift down at Bridgewater Internet Service, a nice and modern place in one of the older buildings running along the Walker River - in as much as it could be a shift. Being a network engineer meant being on-call 24/7, and as Tycho had learned from the many annoyance-fueled rants, it also meant dealing with everything going wrong, oftentimes at once. Fortunately, today was not one of those days - but it had still been a rough day, and it carried in his voice.
"'Ey. Donacdum. Let's just go and take a point and play it slow. What happened today?" The two caught a ride with a passing transport truck.
"You know Old Faithful, right?"
"Pretend like I don't," Tycho snarked. "I do so love your flowery descriptions."
"Okay. Old Faithful is - was, I guess? - this really sh*tty Cisco router. And when I say sh*tty, oh boy." Everyone else on the truck leaned in to listen, most just admiring Tycho's grautitously large shootbang. "I swear the thing is held together with the tears of dying system admins, the grace of God, and the dust that's collected inside it during its... I'd say five hundred years of uptime. It was probably built by Galileo himself, and hasn't seen maintenance since people still thought the Sun revolved around the earth. Fortunately, this was one of the times where management isn't acting stupid as sh*t - our major backbone router is one of the newer models, and Ol' Faithful just handles our intranet."
The truck was silent, for the most part. People either weren't listening or were talking with their own friends.
"Now, today was relatively slow, so I thought it'd be a good day to try and tell them for the fiftieth time 'hey, this thing probably has a steam turbine for a power unit, we might want to replace it with something that can understand what an Internet is'. But unfortunately, management being manglement, they don't want to replace it until it fails - which it did, today. Which meant everyone in this building didn't have Internet. Which means management acted like it's the second coming of Christ and screeched at us to solve the problem."
"Yeah, that sounds normal," chimed in a voice from the other end of the bus.
"Amen to that, invisible brother," Neil continued. "Uptime is god. So naturally, about three minutes before I'm about to try and fight a war that’s already been lost, guess what fails? Old f*cking Faithful."
"With all the time you've been bitching about the thing, and the fact you just said it failed, I can safely say I didn't see it coming." The sarcasm dripped from Tycho's voice, like a waterfall but significantly less so. "I'm surprised it took this long. RIP Ol' Faithful."
"Yeah," mumbled Neil. "Rest in pepperoni, you cancerous stack of sh*t. So anyway, it starts when we lose connection. I swear, every eye in the room puffed over to Ol' Faithful, which starts to whine in a very distressing tone. Sort of like a dog that wants treats, only the dog is actually a router and it sounds like it's going to encounter a halt and catch fire error in about two minutes. There's a bit of hushed communication and then April brings out the straw holder. Oh man, poor Vlad drew the short straw. Dude saved our bacon from getting fried tonight; next time I see him I'm gonna get him a six-pack, on me. Least I can do."
The truck screeched to a stop as distant gunfire filled everyone’s ears. The squad stops for a moment to check their maps and see where the commander placed their attack orders; "Hill Billy", a quaint (really, dumb) name for a place that had changed hands at least a dozen times since Icy Crevasse loaded onto the server. Plodding out, they continued. "So Vlad gets on the phone and starts telling them that there may be a slight disruption in service for the building, while everyone else kind of dithers about. If they were anything like me, they were either trying to see what the problem with the router was, or take cover in case it went up like Kaputnik."
The troupe of men took cover in a nearby apartment complex, setting up and firing potshots. This was a story in the making; none of them felt the need to interrupt it. It wasn't like this battle wouldn't take a few days real-time to win, anyhow. "Eventually it becomes abundantly clear that whatever's wrong with Ol' Faithful, she's given up the ghost. I can't exactly say why, but it's just that feeling you get when you know it's dead. As you know, we just don't shut the thing down because it's so old, so decrepid, and so slow sometimes at everything but routing that nobody's sure if it'll actually come back on. Every time we get a blackout at least one of us has been praying to the gods of IP that it'll turn back on. So I bite the bullet, run over, and pull the plug, because the thing sounds like a Mustang's turbocharger."
Neil's annoyance is punctuated by the deafening blast of Tycho's anti-tank rifle. "Heh. He thought his vest would keep him safe. He thought wrong."
"And today, like I said, was the day it didn't turn back on. The building becomes a headless chicken for a little while as we tried to figure out what the hell to do. Vlad looked battle-focused, he seemed like he was the only person actually successfully getting things done, and he was talking with management. After about an hour of scrabbling about, trying everything we could to get connectivity, Vlad finally stopped everyone and said he was getting Management to ship over a spare router. After that everything was hunky-dory; we plugged it in, did all the config work, and just like that it was the end of the shift. Christ, today was sh*t."
"Hey, jackass," shouted one of the other men in the house, carrying a more modestly sized sniper rifle. "You gonna sit there bitching about your day, or are you going to actually help us excise these dead-grey-" He didn't get to finish as a sniper round caught him through the neck, but it got Neil focused. "Right, right, the video game," he stated, nearly as though for the past five minutes it had been an afterthought
He had barely gotten to shooting for thirty seconds - just a few poorly-aimed potshots as he began to get into the groove - when he heard a whistling. Tycho did something very violent and nasty to someone with his portable artillery gun before stating, "Hey, Neil, your mic dying again? I am hearing some mad whistling coming through it."
Neil thought for a moment. "...no, it shouldn't be. I swear, if this is Windows 10's updates messing with my settings again-" He punched in Shift+Tab like it was second nature, and had barely clicked Settings on the Steam Overlay before something hit the ground so hard he dove right from his seat. Neil couldn't really hear much over the massive blast it made, and he was sure his microphone had picked it all up.
A moment passed, still in shock, before he took stock of his situation. Some things had been knocked over. Something in his house shattered; he hadn't heard it but somehow knew anyways. His computer - oddly enough - still seemed to be in one piece, and he could distantly hear the chatter of a machine-gun through the headphones that had been yanked from his head. He put on his headset and was immediately assaulted over VoIP with a bunch of questions asking if he was okay. They had just heard an explosion, after all; for all they knew his house could have been hit with a mortar round.
"...I'm fine, guys," he responded, and people quieted down. "Gonna head over to a calm place here and then go check out what, exactly, is going on. Maybe I'm getting swatted and the flashbang went off early," he joked, which drew a round of laughter. Nervous laughter, but laughter all the same. "I'll need a few minutes." Neil got up, took a deep breath, prepared for a tripod straight from War of the Worlds to vaporize him, and then walked outside.
He got an obsidian black box, which had carved a nice crater in his front yard. Against all common sense, he walked over to it. A hologram flashed into existence, tinted. It shifted from across the chromatic spectrum before flashing over to green.
ORGANIC LIFE DETECTED.
A wide, thin stream of light scanned over his eyes, and he squinted and brought his hand up to his eyes a moment too late. But that was all the machine had needed.
LEVEL OF SENTIENCE ACCEPTED.
BRAINWAVES ACCEPTED.
BIOLOGY ACCEPTED.
NEW PILOT ACCEPTED.
All of those messages passed by in a matter of seconds. A holographic display of some sort appeared, and he walked up to it. It was a detailed list of features, vaguely akin to a flyer from a supermarket, if that flyer was advertising such things as plasma cannons, artificial intelligence, jump jets, and other various types of giant robot paraphernalia.
200 POINTS TO ASSIGN. ENTER NEW USER SETTINGS NOW.
Neil blinked. He might be away for longer than he had thought.
"Men in Black comes to mind right now. I don't think you've seen it, but we should after this settles over. It's the scene where one of the characters, the one Will Smith plays, he's sitting on a bench with Agent J after he's just found out that aliens exist and the government's keeping them a secret."
Somehow, he felt at home in this, despite the fact he'd had it for a sum total of 40 minutes. The buttons were analog; they were what he could understand. From his house he had a nice view of the city. He hadn't moved out just yet; that would be suicide, given that every line of communication he had tapped into, regardless of difficulty, was pure chaos. The police scanner was wildfire; Twitter had lit up like Burning Man. Things in the small hamlet of Manbury were not okay.
"So he wonders why, and he asks, 'Why the big secret? People are smart. They can handle it.' And Agent J just looks at him... not like he's an idiot, but like he doesn't know. And he says 'A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat.'"
He could hear police sirens. Explosions, dull and off in the distance, so much scarier when they weren't just lines of code being run through a processor. Obviously some of the people that had gotten suits were doing exactly the thing the boxes had warned them not to do.
Or maybe they were following its instructions to the letter.
"Fifteen minutes ago, I thought that boxes that gave people robots wouldn't fall from the sky." Neil sighed, and looked out over the city - feeling simultaneously empowered and endangered. "Safe to say I feel a lot like Will Smith right now."
"Seven is here too, dressed like the concept of choosing clothes that look nice together was an arcane secret far beyond their grasp."
