The following is a bit of alternative fiction based on certain characters from the Xenaverse. It is not meant to infringe on anyone else's rights.
I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I found myself wondering how many people would be involved in this project. I guesstimated maybe thirty or forty, given the size of my contract. Then, because I had only old college campus offices to go by, I envisioned us all working in some cramped spaces, with the bulk of the room given over to the "project."
No doubt I would have a teeny-tiny office to call my own. Perhaps I'd inherited it from someone who got fired just last week. I had a quick vision of a man weeping as he was tossed out on his tuchus. Then my own wide eyed in surprise face and startled derriere took his place.
I was experiencing some doubts as to my abilities.
Especially since I wasn't quite sure what I was going to be called to do.
My title was, according to the people that be in charge, "Senior Project Research and Implementation Supervisor." It seemed simply to mean that I was to nod like I understood the techno-babble my "team" was likely to throw at me. This was something that I found myself doing for my guides a lot as they gave me the grand tour of the facilities.
It was funny how the tour seemed to bypass over half the building.
There were, I surmised, a lot of "top secret," kinds of things going on.
The child's heart, movie goer in me fought against giggling gleefully at the thought that I was in a place where they made James Bond toys. The adult in me was thinking, "What have I gotten myself into?" Well, lets be more accurate, I was still in the blaming stage of the game. It was more like, "What has Sal gotten me into, and how am *I* going to get out of it?" And could I, considering the "contract," and more importantly, should I? Could this really be what I was looking for?
I mean, the things that they did let me look at, like the nanotech lab, were really interesting. I found everything Fabulously intriguing. This stuff was so far afield from where my expertise lay that I was really strongly questioning my reason for being here. It certainly wasn't aesthetics. There seemed to be plenty of beauty, of all kinds around. Nope, they had to have some practical use for me, since the General struck me as the practical type. I was just having trouble figuring it out. I kept my brain on it though. I'd get it eventually.
Still, I knew this would last maybe a month or two before the Penthouse crew realized how incompetent or even dangerous I really was at this and fired my generous ass...or worse, demoted me to the mail room for the rest of my natural career. Which, come to think of it, might not be a bad thing. At least in the mail room, if I had one of my episodes, it wouldn't affect the government or business budget in any permanent way. Unless I set the mail on fire. ...Naw, wouldn't do that again. Not after the last time.
So, my earlier speculation about what kind of atmosphere I'd be working in, and who, were pretty much for naught.
To begin with, the whole team was given a suite of offices on the third floor. Big windows, plenty of light, crafted furniture, carpeted floors, multimedia computers everywhere. Espresso and coffee machines were against the far wall. The kitchen, which was gorgeous, was maybe the whole of ten feet down the hall, complete with well-stocked refrigerator and microwave.
Apparently, the powers that be, understood that thinking was hungry work. Not a lot of people got that, but they did.
Both members of my team were already hard at work when Mel and Pony (*They* insisted I call them that; actually Mel wanted to be called Melli, but I totally doubted I could have said it with a straight face so I compromised,) escorted me in. My team (ooh that notion gave me the shivers. *My team*) actually consisted one senior programmer and one senior engineer. That's it.
If it were possible, this actually made me *more* nervous about the project. My stomach did a flip flop with the realization that my fate was in the hands of these two people. I was suddenly inclined to put forth my best foot. Hopefully not in my mouth....
So, I met them and finally gained an answer to the question I'd asked early on. These two people were working on "The Project." Mel began to explain.
It turned out that Amazon had been contracted by the Pentagon to produce a prototype VR program intended to train Special Forces in the fine art of irregular warfare. If you watch television at all (and I did. It tended to quiet my mind for short spans of time) you can form general opinions about anything, and truthfully, I was under the impression the Green Berets, SEALs, Delta Force and their buds were already experts at making mayhem behind enemy lines. Okay, so I read a lot about this kind of stuff.
I'd played with the notion of joining the military and had set it aside. It had always held a fascination for me, of a sorts, but I knew it wasn't necessarily my calling in this life. I went to college instead, but I'd kept up on my reading, and on the news in both science and the military.
And this background led me to some questions.
So what did they need VR training for, especially given the inherently artificial nature of the experience? I'd read enough about these units to know they were BIG on field training; the intense, high-standards sort that occasionally ended up killing the trainees.
I voiced these musings to my guides, who nodded approvingly at these points. Pony, who had been pretty much silent since we left the penthouse, finally spoke up. "What the Pentagon is looking for is ways of training Special Forces first, then branching out into the rank-and-file, in more... traditional... shall we say, methods of warfare. They want to expose the troops to ways of fighting *without* modern equipment. Rifles, grenades, the Global Positioning System, and so on."
"Why?" I had to ask. I'd found that question very useful in the past.It hid a multitude of sins and it made me look smart. You would think it would be the opposite, but the results spoke for themselves. Pony gave me a hard look, the sort that warned off talking more about this. "Because war itself has changed. Because over a million Hutus were slaughtered with nothing more sophisticated than a machete. Because US troops are being fired on in Nigeria and Bosnia with bow and arrows." I blinked.
A million? That never reached the news.....Bows and arrows? How? When? Ooh, I had more questions to ask, but I didn't get the chance.
Mel's voice kept the Pony from going further, which given the look she was letting off was just as well. "Because the Pentagon wants to train its people to deal with the unexpected."
The look *she* gave Pony had the constitution of solid rock, and quieted the formidable woman almost instantly. I really didn't want to interrupt, lest those hard eyes fall on me, but it needed to be asked if I was going to be any use here...never mind get a good night sleep. "I'm...I'm still a little vague as to what I'm supposed to do here."
"What we need is your expertise in history," Mel told me. "You've written several papers on the Sumerian Amazons, Incas, Aztecs, and the Greeks..."
"Sure, but..." I had to object, the quality of those papers being what might be called the 'bottom of the scholarship barrel.' Sure, a professor had tried to plagiarize one a year or two ago, the bitch, but that hardly made any of them ground-breaking.
I sniffed a bit. According to her my papers were fit more for the Reader's Guide than for any sort of professional publication. She'd said my style was far too personal and not scholastic enough. I'd almost believed her.....Fortunately for me, I'd had a professor, one Henry Strong, (and strong he was!) who believed in me enough to urge me to publish. He was the one who'd been proofing my papers for me. (That's how she'd been caught. She'd got him to proof for her too....) Behind that muscular blonde fluff exterior, lay the heart of a lion and the wise intelligence of the owl. He'd been a steadying force during my years at the University and I missed him a lot.
I almost missed the rest of what Mel had to say, "...and we needed someone who with your knowledge of both the history of such cultures *and* a grounding in computer application to head up the project."
"Wait," I stopped dead in the middle of the hallway. "You want...*me*...to direct..." There was so much they didn't seem to understand and I was probably tossing my chances of employment here out the window, but honesty compelled me to get this clear.
Mel and Pony exchanged an unreadable look, then Mel smiled and said "Bernie, all *you* have to do is tell your team what they need to do, what the program should do, and how it should act. They'll do the rest. You won't even have to *touch* a computer if you don't want to." She took a step back towards me and took my hand.
I won't try to recount what this did to me, save to say, that a few mental and physical circuits went into terminal overload. "Lets go meet your team," she said. Right then it sounded more like a triple X-rated proposal, and I'd have agreed to do almost anything.
I somehow brought my focus back to the introductions.
The programmer seemed nice enough. He was a young lad from western Ohio named, Bradford Arthur Byrons. He'd just graduated from Kent State University with a self-created degree blending higher mathematics and English literature and, like me, had been at the receiving end of Amazon's tendency towards aggressive recruitment. (I felt better knowing that.) He wore wire-rim glasses, grew his hair curly and shoulder-length, and had the cutest goatee you could want to see on a twenty-five year old.
The engineer was only slightly older and a graduate out of a community college in New York. His degree was in marketing, but he had probably more years experience building, rebuilding, and plain messing with electronics than most engineers in Silicon Valley. Jeffrey Allon Isakoff was his name, and he put me in mind of one of the Christian conservatives: clean-cut, sharp suit, and permanent smile. For all that, he immediately put me at ease. Heck, I liked him on the spot and returned the smile as we shook hands.
I didn't make a move towards Bradford, who was hunched over his micro-city of multimedia displays, printouts, and brand-new hardware. The caveman grunts he issued at Pony's introduction warned me off interrupting his communing with his numbers. We'd have another time to get to know each other better.
All in all, I can't say I was altogether displeased. Nice office, good pay, minimal manual labor on my part; I could only hope they didn't ask me to do the accounting. I sucked at numbers.
My pleasure with the outcome of this day, however, didn't mean Sal was off the hook. Not by a long shot. She had some 'splainin' to do....
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This page was last updated: June 24, 1998
ŠJune 1998
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