Tom watched his dramatics with a smirk. Sims weren’t like Calisthenics because it hurt dying in Applied Sims, but only a little, about as much as did a dull headache, just enough to give them a reason to try not to die. Not enough to stop Beamer from dying every chance he got. And certainly not this much.
“Oh, oh, OH GOD!” Beamer screamed, thrashing back to the ground. “OH GOD! This hurts!”
“Yeah,” Tom said lazily. “I’m not falling for it, Beamer.”
“Oh God, oh God, this hurts! It hurts, Tom!”
“Overdoing it, aren’t you, buddy?”
But Beamer was convulsing, blood blossoming out around his punctured gut. “Tom, Tom, help me!” He was sobbing. “Help me. Make it stop! This hurts!”
The smile died off Tom’s lips as Beamer wept. Cold tingles of uneasiness moved down Tom’s spine, because it dawned on him that Beamer wasn’t faking this. A fatal wound kicked you out of a simulation. Instantly. He wasn’t supposed to thrash. He was supposed to heal or vanish.
“Beamer, hey, you okay?”
It was a stupid question, he knew, but Tom wasn’t sure what to say when he dropped to the other boy’s side. Slick blood bubbled over the stones around his armored legs, and Beamer’s frantic eyes moved up to his. He tried speaking, gurgled something like “help,” and then doubled over with racking coughs. Blood splattered from his mouth.
Tom knelt there, frozen, his heart thumping in his ears. He couldn’t seem to move, like an icy hand clutched him in place. Footsteps clattered toward him, and a firm pair of dark hands grappled with Beamer’s thrashing body.
“What’s wrong?” Elliot demanded, taking charge.
“I don’t—we don’t know,” Tom stuttered.
“Beamer?” Elliot called, pinning Beamer’s shoulders. “Beamer? Stephen?”
Tom felt Beamer’s blood drying on his hands and watched Elliot asking Beamer what was the matter as though it wasn’t obvious. He heard Beamer gurgling, whimpering, and watched him twisting back and forth, trying escape the pain, escape the hands on him.
Then Elliot raised his gauntleted hand and waved his arm in a sequence—up and down, up and down, left and right, up and down. It was a series of muscular impulses designed to signal the neural processor and terminate any active simulations. Elliot’s brow furrowed, and he tried it again with his other arm. He dropped them both to his side, baffled. “I can’t turn off the sim.”
Beamer shrieked, and kept shrieking, and Tom looked between Elliot and Beamer. Elliot was waving both arms now like he was in a surreal dance, and Beamer kept giving these gurgling cries of pain, and the sim kept on going.
“I’ve got it,” Tom called. Of course! This would boot Beamer right out of the sim. He unsheathed his sword, and hacked off Beamer’s head.
Elliot scuttled to his feet with a shout, dark blood splashing over the stones around them.
“There,” Tom said, pleased with himself for the quick thinking.
Elliot stared at him, openmouthed.
The look on his face and the uncertainty of the moment flooded Tom with horror. He suddenly remembered some movie he’d seen where people died in a video game and then died in real life. It was just like this. He’d just killed Beamer in their malfunctioning sim, and what if it was a serious malfunction and he was dead in the training room, too?
“Oh God, he was really feeling pain,” Tom cried, the enormity of his mistake crashing over him. “You don’t think he really died, too, do you?”
“No,” Elliot said at once.
“I killed him. I killed Beamer!”
“Tom, the program messes up every few months. I’ve seen it happen a dozen times. People never die from sims.”
Tom stood there, breathless in the hot Trojan sun, gazing down at the headless body of his friend, still thinking of that movie. He couldn’t remember the name. He didn’t know why it mattered so much, but he couldn’t stop wondering what the name was. His whole body was shaking.
Elliot clasped his shoulder. “It’s fine. Beamer’s out of the sim and he’s fine. You did the right thing. You did not kill him. I’ll stop this sim, and you’ll see.” He waved his arm again, trying to end it, his brow furrowed.
“You’re really sure he’s not dead out there?” Tom asked again.
“Tom, I’m positive,” Elliot said with a laugh. “He’s okay.”
Tom just gazed up into the blue sky overhead, feeling the wind flapping through his hair. Relief crashed through him. He found himself laughing. “Wow. You know, I really freaked out for a second there,” he told Elliot, even though Elliot seemed to be preoccupied with the issue of the sim not responding to his command and turning itself off. “I seriously thought it. I seriously thought for a second that I’d killed Beam—”
And then the world exploded around them.
Tom felt like he was hurling through space, weightless. He couldn’t hear his own scream over the crashing in his ears. Stone scraped his hand, so he grasped whatever he could—and it tore off the skin of his fingers as he dragged himself to a halt. Black dust blotted out the sky, stung his lungs. It thinned just enough to reveal the broken walls of the city and Elliot coughing where he clung to the wall above him.
Tom’s arms stung as he slipped farther, and a glance below told him his legs were dangling down toward the flat plains. A firm hand gripped under his arm, and he knew it was Elliot. “Come on!”
Tom grabbed Elliot’s arm, and managed to hoist himself back up onto the remains of the wall. Shouts filled the air. The Greek army below them surged forward through the blown-out chunk of wall to claim Troy.
Elliot stared down, naked disbelief on his face. “That is not supposed to happen. There’s supposed to be a Trojan Horse, not an explosion.”
And then came the ping in both their brains: Program integrity externally breached.
Comprehension flooded Elliot’s face. “It’s an incursion.”
An incursion!
Suddenly it all made sense.
Suddenly it wasn’t scary. Tom looked down through the dust, blinking it out of his eyes as it stung his pupils, his brain suddenly thrumming with excitement. An incursion!
He’d heard of the Spire version of incursions. They’d happened more often three years ago, when the first batch of trainees joined the Intrasolar Forces. The Russo-Chinese hackers couldn’t penetrate too deeply into the Spire’s systems, but they could get into superficial, less secure areas such as the Applied Sims feeds. Russo-Chinese Combatants sometimes hacked into the American Applied Simulations channel and pranked them by playing the part of the enemy, even switching on the Indo-American pain receptors, because that was really the worst damage they could wreak.
In the first year of the program, it apparently happened every few months. None of the Indo-American trainees knew how to hack, so there was no reciprocation, and the Obsidian Corp. software consultants couldn’t write code for answering attacks due to private business agreements with the Russo-Chinese neural processor manufacturer, LM Lymer Fleet. That was one thing that changed once Blackburn arrived. The first incursion attempt on his watch, he sent something back, and no one knew what it was. He also upgraded the firewall. The incursions had stopped … until now. Maybe the Russo-Chinese victory near Neptune convinced them to try it again.