Chapter 21
“Yes, sir. The captain informed me. He’s down the hall, the last room on the right.”
They thanked the man and entered the building. A small anteroom led to a fluorescent-lit hallway lined with doors, all ajar and all leading to darkened offices. The administrative building, like everywhere else on base, was shut down until further notice.
Brodie and Taylor had used the satellite phone in Sergeant Miller’s Land Rover to call Captain Pickman’s house.
He’d been home, and he’d told them that he had already been instructed by Major Klasky to show the CID agents Camp Hayden’s after-action review system.
They figured they’d kill two birds with one stone—review the after-action recordings and see if Captain Pickman was as big a tool as Sergeant Miller made him out to be.
They entered the last room on the right. The lights were on but dimmed. In the middle of the large room was a sizable table containing a precise model of the training village—every road, every building, every car, even the sand berm and the surrounding man-made hills for the machine gun nests.
Standing next to the table was a trim thirty-year-old man in desert camo with close-cropped red hair, blue eyes, and an impressively square jaw.
Actually, his whole head was kind of block-shaped, and he strode toward the two agents with a weird gait, like he was trying to cover more distance with each step than his legs would allow.
He extended his hand and flashed an awkward grin.
“Captain Ben Pickman. Pleasure to meet you.”
Brodie, who suspected the captain was a fugitive shapeshifter from Area 51 still figuring out how to act human, shook his hand and said, “Good to meet you, Captain. Thank you for arranging this on short notice.”
Pickman nodded. “Your investigation is the only thing going at Camp Hayden. I was waiting for your call.” He dropped his smile and said, “May-bell. The agents can’t see you in the dark.”
Brodie now noticed another person standing in the room near a bank of mounted flat-screen monitors.
The figure stepped into the light, revealing a slight woman of about twenty in desert camo with short brown hair.
She wore the eagle insignia of a specialist, and her name tape read “Christiansen Blair.” She said in a slight southern accent, “Sir, ma’am.
SPC Christiansen Blair. A pleasure to make your acquaintance. ”
Taylor, who appeared delighted to see another woman from below the Mason-Dixon, smiled warmly at her. “You as well, Specialist.”
Captain Pickman said, “May-bell operates our augmented-reality review system. She is one of only two specialists at the camp who aren’t Rangers or MPs. Isn’t that right, May-bell?”
“That is correct, sir,” replied the SPC.
Brodie looked at Captain Pickman as the man stared at the young specialist. There were two reasons a commissioned officer might repeatedly refer to an enlisted soldier by their first name—as an expression of informality and friendship, or as a power move.
He was pretty sure he knew which one the captain was employing.
The junior officers were oftentimes the senior assholes.
Pickman said to Christiansen Blair, “Explain to Mr. Brodie and Ms. Taylor what this system is and how it works.”
“Yes, sir.” She turned to the CID agents.
“This room houses our augmented-reality after-action review system. As you can see, we have a one-hundredth-scale model of our training village. Our SIMRES system uses cellular and GPS signals to record the precise geolocation of each exercise participant—Rangers and D-17s—every half second, as well as when and where they fire their weapons. This information is fed into a computer program that generates a three-dimensional render of every moment of every exercise, and those renders are projected onto our model here by our integrated visual augmentation system, which is a fancy word for VR goggles.” She smiled.
Brodie decided her accent was more Appalachian than southern, which meant she and Magnolia Taylor were at least second cousins. Brodie said to her, “That sounds impressive, Specialist.”
Pickman said to the SPC, “Tell them about the capabilities the system has with obstructing objects.”
Christiansen Blair nodded. “Dynamic occlusion, sir. Essentially, if you’re projecting a virtual image onto a real space, how do you make it so that a real physical object—in this case, say, a model of a building—dynamically blocks your view of a virtual object when it ought to be obstructed, like a virtual soldier taking cover behind the building?
This tech is being developed by the military for use in the field and therefore on the fly, so it’s all done in real time, not based on any pre-render.
It’s in beta, but so far has been working quite well. ”
Scott Brodie was getting about half of this at most, which was probably enough. The tech stuff could be as much of a distraction as an aid, even on a case like this.
Captain Pickman added, “This is state-of-the-art stuff.”
“So’s killer robots,” said Brodie.
Pickman did not reply.
Taylor said, “We’d like to see one of your training playbacks.”
“Yes, ma’am,” replied the specialist. She retrieved two sets of large VR goggles, which looked familiar to Brodie from photos and videos he’d seen of people looking like idiots. The goggles were attached by long cables to a computer in the corner of the room. “There’s a head strap you can adjust.”
Brodie put the goggles on and did his best to adjust the strap. The headset was heavy and uncomfortable. The future was here, and it sucked.
He could see through the goggles, though everything looked dim.
SPC Christiansen Blair said, “Give me one sec,” then flicked a switch, and all the structures on the table glowed neon green. Brodie noticed blacklights shining from the ceiling onto the model village, which must have been coated in blacklight paint.
Brodie turned and looked at Taylor, who was exaggeratedly looking around the room from behind her goggles. Maggie Taylor looked good wearing almost anything, but even she couldn’t pull these things off.
Pickman said, “Cue up the most recent exercise.” He said to Brodie and Taylor, “Our Rangers gave them hell. I mean, up to a point.”
Up to the point when they all died, he meant.
Brodie heard the woman punch some keys, then a stream of floating red text popped up in Brodie’s viewfinder. Most of it was gibberish to him, though he did make out a date: May 20.
He focused on the model of the village as dozens of bright objects popped up all over—blue human-shaped icons dispersed around the town.
In the road, on rooftops, entering buildings.
He saw now what the specialist had been talking about with the obstruction of virtual objects by real ones.
As a blue human icon went into a building—there were no complex animations, just a drifting shape—the icon disappeared, and then partially reappeared through a window.
Brodie stepped to his left a few paces to get a different perspective and saw the blue “person” through the doorway.
It was actually incredible, and lent realism and dimension to these digital avatars.
He kept rounding the table until he was around the backside of the high sand berm. Twelve inverted red triangles were lined up behind it, motionless. The tin men.
Brodie now noticed a timecode ticking forward by the millisecond in the bottom right of his field of vision. He watched and waited as the seconds passed. Then, in an instant, the red triangles crested the berm and moved swiftly toward the village.
The little model village lit up with what looked like tracer rounds, bursts of red and blue dashes punching through the air.
A blue figure on a rooftop scored a kill with a mounted machine gun, and a red triangle blipped off. Return fire from the advancing triangles immediately wiped out the blue guy, plus another gunner on a hilltop.
The blue icons moved frantically around the village as the triangles rapidly advanced, while simultaneously hitting the village with an unending barrage of red rifle fire. The Rangers got another kill, and then three of them were shot through the open windows.
As the D-17s entered the village, the battle intensified.
Three bots began scaling a tall building.
Two more fired down the roadway with precision, taking out three more Rangers.
The red rounds only grew in frequency and intensity, while the blue ones grew sparse as the Rangers took cover.
Which was natural and expected. It’s hard to aim and shoot while someone is firing directly at you trying to kill you.
Unless, of course, you’re a tin man without a heart.
A streak of blue light arced out of a window and missed its target in the roadway.
A grenade round. More grenades flew out of windows and off rooftops, as the Rangers attempted to saturate the narrow roadways with detonations.
If the Rangers’ targets had been human, the slim roads and alleys would have been ideal kill zones.
But, Brodie imagined, the SIMRES training system was programmed for the intended target, meaning the grenades being launched by the Rangers had a smaller kill radius for the armored bots than they would have for a human.
Therefore, round after round rained down on the red triangles, and only two blipped out.
It was over quickly after that. The red triangles breached every building and took out the Rangers.
Even as little red triangles versus blue stick figures, the superior speed and dexterity of the D-17s was obvious.
They reacted faster and got off more shots and fired with perfect accuracy every time.
The little blue people blipped out one by one, until there was only a single Ranger left, running along the roadway toward a three-story building with a mounted machine gun on top.