Chapter 42.
The last instruction they’re given is that there’s to be no conversation between the players once the games begin.
Those who’ve brought their phones with them to the ballroom have had them confiscated by the guards stationed just inside the door, to be returned when everyone is finished, just in case anyone even considers looking for online help with the gaming or the strategy.
“Do they think people are going to try to cheat at Checkers?” Elena says as she leans toward Jack, barely moving her lips. “Or Go?”
Jack smiles at the lovely newswoman who wants to be prime minister someday, provided she makes it out of this alive.
“Machine’s paranoid,” he murmurs back. “Takes one to know one.”
A cold voice comes over the speakers.
“Start.”
People settle in like exam takers.
Headsets on. Microphones down. Screens bright. Hands suddenly clumsy.
As soon as they begin, there is a new, thick tension in the room, obviously different from the physical challenges they’ve already faced but every bit as real, even though this morning’s competition involves games some of them, perhaps all of them, have played as kids.
The stakes are just higher now.
They’re focused on the screens in front of them, taking a test on which their lives depend.
All wear headsets with microphones attached.
Some have chosen the option of having their computerized opponent talk back to them.
Some play grimly in silence, the headphones blocking out any possible noise from players to either side of them, everyone clearly feeling the same thick, kinetic—almost oppressive—energy.
For now, the only scoreboard is the one in front of them. Because of the soundproofing from the headphones, none of them can hear the occasional curse from one of the players, or a sound indicating that someone might be in mental pain because of something that just happened on their screen.
In the end, Jack McHenry loses a long, grueling game of Chess the way you lose a war you didn’t know you were fighting: slowly, then all at once.
His silent opponent had relentlessly stalked his every move, even ones that Jack considered quite brilliant.
But Jack had kept even, until his opponent made a move Jack learned years before, killing time on base with a staff sergeant who’d loved Chess the way other men loved whiskey.
It’s called the Arabian Mate—the opponent’s knight and rook work together to checkmate your king, usually in a corner. Jack had seen it coming three or four moves away, defended it as long as he could before finally being unable to stop the inevitable from happening.
Game over.
Jack is now the one spitting out a quiet epithet as he gets out of his chair, another one in the room already beaten.
Across the room, Elena Torres fights a Checkers match like it’s a siege.
Elena was a whiz at Checkers when she’d attended boarding school in London, though they called the game Draughts over there, even playing tournaments for a local club.
Today she plays a long and careful and tortuous game, taking no reckless chances, playing a defensive game from the start.
People who have only played Checkers for fun, she will tell Jack later, have no idea how long a tournament game involving skilled players can last.
In long games people get impatient. The machine doesn’t. Finally, though, she is overwhelmed by her own AI opponent, feeling so crowded she’s surprised her chair doesn’t fall over behind her, unable to jump any of her opponent’s pieces.
Elena had chosen a voice option—a woman’s voice—on her computer, and she has set it for Spanish. When the game is over, she hears this in her headset:
“Lo hiciste bien.”
You did well.
All the nerves she had been feeling for more than an excruciating hour—in a Checkers game!—come out of her at once.
“Vete a la porra,” she hisses, then instantly flushes, ashamed of herself for sounding like Tipton, something that makes her feel smaller than she can afford to in the moment.
She stands and looks around for Jack, like she needs to see a face she trusts.
She sees Jimmy getting up from his own game of Checkers and joins him. She can tell from the pained look on his face, normally optimistic even in the worst of times, that he has also just taken a beating.
Elena reaches him first.
Jimmy exhales once.
“Tell me you lost too,” Jimmy says. “Because I got wrecked.”