Senior Stanford student Chuck Bartowski signs up for a campus gaming tournament. The tournament is not what it seems. Chuck's life is not what it seems. He is about to discover both, prizing appearance apart from reality. Will he survive the discovery?
A/N: Trial chapter balloon for a new story. I'm playing fast and loose with Stanford's academic calendar (they're on quarters and I've changed that to semesters, e.g.) and with some of the physical details of the campus.
Jeux Sans Frontières
Chapter One: Knockout
Whistling tunes, we hide in the dunes by the seaside.
Whistling tunes, we're kissing baboons in the jungle.
It's a knockout.
— Peter Gabriel, Games Without Frontiers
Stanford Campus/Spring Break 2018/Monday Morning
Chuck Bartowski checked the final box and wrote 'Chuck Bartowski' on the bottom of the sheet of paper clipped to the clipboard. It was a sign-up sheet for a campus gaming tournament.
He looked ahead of himself in the line of other students, all with clipboards in their hands. He was whistling softly, tunelessly to himself.
The other students wore old hoodies, Mexican ponchos, untucked shirts. Several wore unfashionable hats. Birkenstocks and Chuck Taylors dominated feet. Everyone had a pin- or patch-decorated shoulder bag or backpack.
Most of the students Chuck knew, a least a little, recognized — they were students he took classes with, students he gamed with on the weekends, students he sat among, near the walls, during campus events. A few saw him looking at them and waved. He nodded back.
Comp Sci majors, Engineering majors, Math majors, Philosophy majors. All the major nerds.
He wanted to kick himself. Gaming on campus was no way to spend his senior Spring Break. But he had no choice. He was a poor scholarship student; he had no money to travel. His sister Ellie, who practically raised him, was a med student at UCLA, and she had little money to give him, and he would have been ashamed to ask.
His job in the Stanford library kept him in pocket change, so to speak, but it would not finance any get-away. The tournament was the only diversion available to him — and he needed a diversion.
The Fall of his senior year had been a ghoulish play scribbled by some 'D' student in an existentialism class, by some half-wit Sartre epigone. Chuck's girlfriend of more than a year, Jill Roberts, had dumped him unceremoniously just after Thanksgiving Break and then ceremoniously began a public, torrid romance with his until-then best friend, Bryce Larkin. The couple was an overnight campus sensation and Chuck got to be part of the audience. No Exit.
As if stealing Jill was not gut-wrenching offense enough, Bryce also fingered Chuck as the instigator of a cheating scheme in a psychology course they both were taking. The accusation was false and was proven to be so just before the end of the term, but it hung, dark-cloud-like, heavy over the end of Chuck's Fall. He had gone home to Burbank depressed and defeated, and he had remained so all Spring term too. No Exit.
Depressed and defeated. He needed a diversion. An exit.
Chuck looked again at the sign-up sheet. In the upper left-hand corner was the logo of the game sponsoring the tournament: SpyCraft. The game was brand new, still in the final testing stages. The tournament was meant both to advertise the game before it became widely available and to identify and tweak any remaining defects, if any. Chuck had read about the game in one of his gaming magazines; it was being heavily hyped. It was a first-person shooter but with a thinker's twist: the game required the player to separate friend from foe, often in split-second real-time, and to manage constant, incoming data, using it to decipher the situation and to understand the mission. The game concept was that the player, the spy, had lost his or her memory as a result of a blow to the head, and came back to consciousness in media res, in a mission he or she neither remembered nor understood.
The game's graphics were supposed to be state-of-the-art, truly immersive. The game incorporated a newly-redesigned virtual reality headset, and the game's incoming data sets — dubbed 'flashes' by the game designers — were fed to the player either as video, visible text, or as audio.
Chuck was excited to play the game but not so excited that he was happy to be there, on campus instead of somewhere else, almost anywhere else. The campus was haunted by shadows for Chuck, shadows of Jill, and Bryce, shadows of abandonment and betrayal. And it was not just the campus that was haunted by such shadows. Chuck's life itself was haunted by them too. But he forced his mind away from his shadows by an act of will.
The line Chuck stood in stretched ahead of him to a door of the Gates Computer Science Building. A small, dark-haired woman, Lou, stood against the propped-open door. Beside her was a box of clipboards; she was handing out the sign-up sheets.
Chuck stole a look at her. She caught him doing so and smiled at him, a warm smile. He had talked to her once or twice that Spring. One of her classes met down the hall from one of his, and at the same time, so he ran into her in the hallway. She was always patient with him, happy to chat. He had thought about asking her out, but a sighting of Jill and Bryce hand-in-hand in the hallway brought him up short and he'd never had the nerve even to think about asking her out again.
Until now. Her smile grew and Chuck waved weakly at her. He decided then and there that he would ask her out. Maybe she'd have dinner with him after the day's gaming session? There was a sandwich place on campus he could afford. Worth a shot: better than another night alone in my dorm room.
He began to consider what he would say. A moment later, the line began to move.
Chuck had been staring at his high, black Chucks as the line moved, plotting witty, winsome banter. As he neared the door, he looked up expectantly, but only to find Lou gone. In Lou's place stood a Norse Warrior Princess. Were there Norse Warrior Princesses?
The woman wore a white lab coat with 'SpyCraft' stitched above the chest pocket. Her long blond hair was pulled back, tight, into a ponytail. She had on tortoise-rimmed glasses. Below the hem of the lab coat, he could see her bare legs and a pair of black, low-heeled shoes. She did not need high heels: she was tall and obviously athletic, statuesque, even mostly covered by the lab coat. She frightened and delighted Chuck in equal measure. He did not mean to stare. He had been expecting to see Lou, and instead, he saw her — whoever she was — and he could not look away.
He stared, transfixed, all his normal awkward self-awareness absorbed by his absorption in her. She seemed aglow, mythic.
As Lou had earlier, the woman caught him staring. Unlike Lou, she frowned dramatically at Chuck, glaring back at him in an icy challenge. She must have thought Chuck was ogling her.
Chuck smiled apologetically but her blue gaze became colder, more intense. Rebuffed, chilled, he dropped his eyes. He snuck another glance after a moment and, luckily, she was busy and did not notice.
She was taking clipboards from each person who went through the door, reading the name from it and glancing over it, presumably to ensure that it was correctly filled out.
Chuck blushed as he got to the door and handed the woman his clipboard. She met his gaze for a brief blue moment and then looked down at the paper. "Chuck," she said, "Chuck Bar-tow-ski?" The question was asked with her head down.
"Um, yeah, that's me, Chuck Bar-tow-ski."
When she looked up, the quality of her eyes had shifted somehow. For a second, Chuck thought he saw recognition in her eyes as if his name meant something to her. But then it was gone; her eyes were sheer ice above a perfunctory smile.
"Welcome to SpyCraft, Chuck Bartowski, — " she paused for a second, or he thought she did — "good luck. You'll find what you need inside."
By the time Chuck was prepared to respond, she had already shifted her eyes to the next person in line. Chuck swallowed his response and walked through the doorway, into the Gates Building.
After the drenching California sunlight outside, the Gates Building seemed dark inside.
Chuck stood for a moment, blinking, waiting for his eyes to adjust. He knew the building; he had attended classes there and his faculty advisor, Dr. Fleming, had his office there. The lighting inside seemed oddly dim, dimmer than Chuck remembered.
But perhaps it was just the contrast between the weak lighting inside and the blinding Norse Warrior Princess outside. Chuck normally never thought in such terms, but this one rose unbidden: she was a knockout. The sight of her was a roundhouse to the head. He was reeling. Shaken, and shaking his head, Chuck rejoined the line.
He looked around, expecting to see Lou inside, but she was missing again.
A large man, tall and thickly built, wearing a white, logo lab coat like the woman outside, was handing the VR headsets to each person who passed him. The man grunted as he worked, grunting each time he handed headsets to someone as if the grunts were his way of keeping count.
His grunt seemed deeper when he handed the gear to Chuck, and the grunt transmuted into a worded comment: "Check the number on your headset."
Chuck was beginning to mistrust both his eyes and his ears. Had the woman recognized Chuck's name? Had the man particularly noted Chuck? Chuck shook his head again as he entered the computer lab.
The lab had been refitted for the tournament, and the refitting had to have cost a lot of money.
Against the back wall, above an exit door, was a banner: Welcome to the World of SpyCraft! More computers had been added, and the screen of each displayed the SpyCraft logo. The room looked like it would hold about twenty or twenty-five players. It was already nearly full. Chuck looked at his headset and saw a number: 23. One of the untaken computers had that number on a folded card beside it, and Chuck walked to that computer and dropped his shoulder bag on the computer's opposite side.
The computer was on an elevated pedestal, and beneath it, attached to the pedestal, was a collection of sensors Chuck did not recognize. He noticed there was a bull's eye on the floor, about six feet from the sensors, and he then understood that was where the player stood. The sensors must be motion detectors.
A moment later, the Norse Warrior Princess entered the room and strode to a podium below the SpyCraft sign. She still seemed aglow; the lab was brighter after she entered. There was a palpable, cool intensity about her. She clicked on the microphone and leaned toward it.
"Welcome, players, to the first SpyCraft tournament." Her tone was clipped, no-nonsense, not particularly welcoming. "Our game is state-of-the-art; we hope you enjoy it. If you would stand on the bull's eye in front of your computer, and please put on your VR headsets. My audio will come to you through the headset."
Chuck put on the headset, adjusting it for comfort.
The headset crackled for a moment, then the woman's voice was clear. "I assume everyone can hear me? If not, raise your hand. No one? Everyone can hear me. Good. We will now activate your headsets."
A moment later, the VR headset displayed a scene. It was a beach, the ocean, warship-grey and choppy, large waves crashing ashore, was on one side, and a profusion of sand dunes was on the other. The scene was remarkably life-like, three-dimensional, and the sound of the waves and of suddenly passing seagulls also life-like and three-dimensional — the waves sounded nearer than the gulls, as the waves looked to be. He could almost smell the ocean. Chuck had to remind himself he was standing in the Gates Building, in a computer lab.
"Each of you should be immersed in a beach scene. You control yourself in the world of SpyCraft by performing the action you need yourself to perform in the game. There is a small, very small time lag, but you should adjust to it quickly. Take a moment and walk around the beach, getting a feel for movement in the game. — Okay. Now, bend down and grab a handful of sand."
Chuck squatted and reached down. He saw his hand meet the sand and he made a grabbing motion. He saw his hand fill with sand.
"You will notice that you, of course, have no tactile sensation of the sand filling your hand or running out between your fingers, although you can see both. Again, this is a feature of the game to which you must adjust. Items in the world have no discreet tactile properties, that is, properties that can only be touched. This means, most importantly, that items you might contact or use have no weight, no resistance of that kind. Some items, items too big for you to move bodily in the game, will simply be unmovable in that way. Move around the beach and pick up some of the items; give yourself a chance to adjust. Note that the objects also lack discreet olfactory and gustatory qualities. If you need to know information about weights or odors or flavors, the information will be displayed as visual text."
Chuck walked in place in the Gates Building — but walked along the beach in SpyCraft. He saw an old beer can on the beach and bent to grab it. He held it, examined it, and dropped it. A few steps beyond, he saw a small piece of driftwood and he picked it up and threw it into the water, watching it splash as it collided with a wave and hearing the sound. Chuck marveled at the game, the technical wizardry of it.
He turned in place, looking first out toward the watery horizon and then turning toward shore. In the distance, past the dunes, he could see a dense, green jungle. Again he heard gulls. The illusion was convincing.
"Okay. We are going to begin play. Keep in mind that as the game begins, you will find yourself in an unknown situation. You are a spy on a mission but have suffered a blow to the head, been knocked out.
"You have to discover who you are, discover where you are, discover your mission, and, along the way, discover your allies and enemies, all while managing to stay alive. In the first game, you have three lives. — Take a few more minutes to adjust, then your VR headsets will darken. When they light up again, the game will have started."
Chuck walked the beach, picking up seashells and wandering out into the water. He found he could only go so far before he stopped and could go no farther. There were limits internal to the scenes that would have to be discovered. Not everything that looked possible in the game was possible.
After about five minutes, the headset went dark. Chuck felt his heart begin to speed up and braced himself.
The headset lit up. Chuck blinked.
Blinding sunlight.
He was standing on another beach. On the sand a few feet in front of him lay a pistol. He started to turn, to survey his surroundings, when small puffs of sand exploded near him. He heard soft, muffled spits. It took him a second to process it. Someone's shooting at me! He ran, crouched down to scoop up the pistol, and veered wildly toward the dunes.