The boots of the armies never touched the soil, battling atop compacted layers of the dead. The broken corpses lay in heaps from horizon to horizon, discarded weapons jutting up like sprigs of a drought-stricken crop. And still, the battle raged.
“Your ex used to play this, right?” asked Echo, never taking her eyes off the monitor on the bedroom wall. “You think he’s out there somewhere?”
“Oh, no,” said Zoey, “he’d be hundreds of miles away from the battle, farming digital food and selling it to both sides at inflated prices. He’d have seen all of this as a big investment opportunity.”
“That sounds hot.”
“It was! Growing up where I did, having a guy who seemed to have it all figured out? Mmm. Yeah. And he’d spent his teenage years as a nerd, so he thought I was the hottest thing in the world. I thought he was going to have a heart attack the first time I took off my top. I should have known I was in trouble once he learned how to dress himself.”
They were in Zoey’s room. Echo was curled up in the chair with a glass of wine, Zoey was on her bed under the influence of the pain meds her nurse had left behind earlier (yeah, it turns out if you’re rich enough, you can get somebody to come stitch you up right in your own bedroom in the middle of the night). Stench Machine would normally have been up there with her, but he was currently under the bed in a silent fit of rage over Zoey having brought another cat home. It was almost five in the morning and they’d been watching the battle since they’d gotten back to the estate an hour ago. The most recent development in the virtual war was that another army had swarmed in to support the remnants of Dirk Vikerness’s garrison at the ruins of their citadel, nearly encircling Martius Chobb’s invading force and cutting them off from their supply lines. Now a rear guard of Marti’s was trying to hold them off so that the rest of his soldiers could retreat back to friendly territory, the withdrawing forces trickling across a single narrow bridge that was the only passage over a glowing river of lava.
Echo said, “This is the most stressful thing I’ve watched all month.”
“Ooh, we should go find my castle on here.”
“I, uh, think they razed it.”
“So who built it? And the army, all of that? That wasn’t you, was it? Something you were tinkering with behind the scenes?”
“I think your avatar was being run by an AI,” said Echo, “mimicking your voice. Your army was made up of some real people and some bots.”
“But who set it all up? Someone was organizing all of this with a fake me.”
“My guess? Someone from The Blowback. As far as I can tell, ‘you’ showed up in the Hub right after the real you came home from the, uh, hospital last summer. They had failed to get you in real life, so they needed to pull you into their world. They got a whole bunch of followers to mine Spoils and built an army that would appear imposing, but that could be beaten. All so they could have a fight they could actually win.”
“This is getting depressing. Will these guys spend the rest of their lives in here doing this?”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Hopefully just their angriest years. A lot of them will probably wake up one day and see that thirty is around the corner and think, ‘What the hell am I doing? I need to get a wife and a real place to live.’ But in terms of giving them something to do in the meantime, it beats prison.”
“It is a kind of prison, if you think about it.”
Echo shrugged. “If you think about it, everything is.”
“That chair isn’t very comfortable. Do want to come over here on the bed with me?”
“No, I have to get going. The, uh, dogs need me.”