Dream Drive: Yuri Ch. 01

Researching the tournament, Yuri had heard that each game would be selected by Emil Mohammed and during each game the players would clash on a map, or track that was also selected by him. Yuri figured it would be Emil's favorite games and maps. For that reason, he had done his homework on the man.

The first thing he had discovered was that Emil Mohammed was an Arab and a devout Muslim. The second thing he found was that his great-grandparents had been born in the old kingdom. Yuri hadn't expected that. Now that the Caliphate was largely isolated from the rest of the world, hearing of someone who had ties to the old kingdom and was part of a global trend was very rare.

Emil's ancestors had emigrated to France and that was where Emil had been born. He had emigrated to the USA to attend one of their high-tech colleges and there he had dropped out to work as a video game developer. At age thirty, he had been a rock star on the rise, as far as the world of game design was concerned. He quit his job and founded Crux Software. Over the next decade, his company became the most venerated video game developer. They mostly did RPGs, which was why Yuri had never heard of them before researching for their tournament.

For the past five years, Emil had been working on this game called Isis, that Yuri now had in his possession. During that time, there was next to no trace of the man available to the general public.

Yuri had been about to dig deeper and utilize the intelligence assets he had at his disposal, when he had learned he didn't need to. The official rules of the tournament had been released. All the games and maps would be subject to random selection; Emil merely compiled the lists that they would be chosen from. The lists were finalized and made public before the tournament started.

Yuri had managed to reach the quarterfinals, where the top sixteen players were supposed to clash. The winner of each clash would advance to the semifinals, where they would play one-on-one, before an online audience of millions. He did the mental math. The semifinals had been played just hours ago. The winners of the semifinal matches would face off in tomorrow's final and the champion would take home 50,000 Vitcoins. That was a hefty payout. It was more than three times what an average person could earn in a year, even in GAU nations.

Vitcoins were illegal in the Caliphate. Converting them into Caliphate dinars necessitated dealing with the less savory elements of society. Even Yuri's circle of quartermasters avoided that. He followed their example in this matter.

He hadn't really cared about the money, he had been after the prestige qualifying for the final tournament would give him and the information he was able to trade it for. Besides, he had cheated his way to victory in every round. Claiming the cash after that would feel like robbery.

The guys at the Cipher School's skunkworks had cobbled together a monster of a Dream Drive rig for Yuri to use on his mission. It was contained inside a very large briefcase that was bulletproof and resistant against explosions and heat. It weighed almost eighty pounds and Yuri kept it under his bed.

The time difference between the Caliphate and America meant that he did half of his work from home, at night. The other half of his work, playing against European GAU kids, had been done at the School, during the day. An identical rig to the one under his bed was set up in his office.

I need to return this rig to the School. He had gotten so used to it in the past few months that he was reluctant to have to go back to his usual, boring, old computer again.I'll return it after my leave ends, not before.

Aside from providing him with extreme speed satellite access to both the Dream Drive Hub and the general internet, the rig's connection was hardwired with a superior encryption that guaranteed privacy.

The rig was special cause the boys had made a few additions to it. One of them allowed for him to target things with his eyes, instead of actually moving his virtual arms and sighting down a virtual barrel. Whatever Yuri looked at and willed to be shot would be hit.

With that simple cheat, Yuri had won practically every FPS game. Even if the other three gamers on the map teamed up to put him down, he could snipe them when they peeked out from behind cover as he was jump-running out of their traps. There was no beating that. They rarely managed to squeeze even a single point from him. The only downside was that, for every shot he made, he had to be his computer's meat puppet for a split second. It was well worth it, since he'd start each match with all fifteen possible points. That was very demoralizing to his opponents.

Racing games followed. Yuri and the boys had thought up another cheat, one that would calculate the exact moves needed to pass through the course using ideal racing lines and optimized speeds. It was a great cheat, but they couldn't use it. It didn't account for the presence of other players on the track. Being the overall match leader, Yuri would always start from the rear and he had to adjust his performance to those of the other three gamers.

The racing games often had demolition derby elements to them and winning those couldn't be achieved with a simple, straightforward race. In some other games, there were special powerups that a player really, really needed to pick up if they wanted to win, racing lines be damned.

Attempting to modify the cheat to be able to be activated at will, or be subject to Yuri hitting the brakes whenever someone crossed his nose, would carry a risk of lag detection by Crux's servers. He decided the risk of getting caught cheating was simply not worth it. He let those fifteen games go to the others. Split three ways, they were never enough for anyone to catch up to his lead. No one player he went up against could win fifteen vehicle games in a row. Not against the kind of players that were in the tournament. Even Yuri managed to squeeze a couple of racing victories for himself over the rounds.

The last fifteen games were real time strategies. Fifteen random games, each played as random factions on random maps. They were the most popular and most exciting part the tournament. Aside from the global obsession with RTS games, they were the ones in which the winner of each round was finally determined.

Yuri had gathered recordings of the other players' games. For every serious gamer there were at least a hundred hours of those available in various gaming forums online. Yuri had loaded them into a tactical analysis program and crunched the numbers. He had compiled a breakdown of every player's tactics and foibles for every faction of every game on Emil Mohammed's list.

Between individual FPS and racing games, he'd pose his avatar to silently watch over the growing numbers of his Followers and quickly study his notes on the opponents he was matched up against.

He'd go into every RTS game fully prepared for them. He had the advantage of not needing to scout his enemies and figure out their tactics and then having to adapt to them. He would rarely be mistaken over how they'd come after him. He'd simply build the specific types of units that were best to defend against their attacks and trim his upgrade tree to just the special powers needed to crush their particular forces of choice.

The other players would all come after him, right out of the gate. Having predicted their tactics, he'd be able to position his resources in such a way that their forces wound up tripping over one another. All games had their alliance options disabled during the tournament, so the other players' units would always wind up fighting each other. The players would be left unsure if they should proceed, or retreat and regroup.

Yuri would exploit their confusion to build up his forces and destroy the player that held second place. This would leave Yuri weakened. The remaining two gamers would knock him out and then one of them would win the game. That suited Yuri just fine. He'd pick which one of them would win by focusing his resistance on the other one.

This strategy also prevented the other players from teaming up to ensure one of them won instead of Yuri. Normally, gamers were too competitive to sacrifice themselves for another gamer, but the humiliating defeats Yuri handed out in the first third of the match carried the risk of such an event happening. Once Yuri handed the gamer in fourth place an easy win, that gamer was hooked and wanted to go all the way, even if it meant winning all fifteen RTS games. They'd always believe they could pull it off.

By the time the RTS part of the match was drawing to a close, none of the other players would have a chance of catching up to Yuri's lead. Adding the fact that his manipulations would engender some bad blood between the other three gamers, the last few games became a true free for all. Yuri would then amply demonstrate his savvy by crushing all three of his opponents, one by one. He'd cement his overall victory with clear triumphs.

To those who knew their way around an RTS game, it was obvious that Yuri was a masterclass player. Whether he won, or lost a particular game, it was always a close run thing with multiple, thrilling reversals of the tactical situation. The fans would be very appreciative of the way he'd direct each game to his ultimate advantage. Recordings of his RTS games quickly became viral. They brought Yuri's alter ego far more Followers than his immaculate FPS record.

In the end, Yuri'd win only six, or seven of the RTS games. Combined with the fifteen points from the FPS games, he'd win each round by a comfortable margin.

Yuri turned over the packet in his hand. He had thought that an advance copy of the Isis game was the prize for the winner of the tournament, but Mohammed's note contradicted that. He took the game case out of the bubble wrap. It had a big tree on the cover. A tiny AO stamp in the corner marked it as Adults Only. He opened the game case with his knife and ripped off the factory tape.

A single black chip was inside. It had an inverted red pentagram on it. The title of the game was written under it in cursive script.

Yuri considered his options. Either he spent the next -he checked the clock- three hours and twenty-six minutes spinning his mental wheels in circles, or he tried this game to distract himself from the thoughts of Wada's warm embrace and the way her cheeks puffed out whenever she smiled and-

He shut his eyes and drew a slow, deep breath. He couldn't possibly endure that. He had no other distractions in the apartment.

He crouched by the bed and reached for his Dream Drive under it. If he tried to pull the heavy case out, he might wake someone up. There were wheels attached to the case, but it was on its side at the moment. He touched the latch next to the carrying handle with his index finger. After a second, the fingerprint reader confirmed his identity and a small panel opened up on the side. Yuri tapped in his code and the lid of the case clicked open.

He reached further in, getting down on one knee, and engaged the Dream Drive unit in safe mode. His fingers scraped on the lip of the helmet for a few seconds, before he finally managed to pull it out of its shape-fitting section of the case. He opened a slot in the Drive itself and inserted the Isis chip. He knew the game couldn't possibly be on the chip. Not if it was anything like it was purported to be. The chip merely provided access to the Crux gaming servers which held and ran the game itself.

Normally, Yuri hated such business practices, where a person only bought access rights to a thing, instead of their own copy of the thing, but this one came free, so his misgivings were moot. He quietly closed the case and straightened up.

He lay down on the bed and put the oversized helmet on his head. A series of actuated pistons silently locked the helmet in place, forming a snug inner sheath against his scalp. Only the bottom half of his face remained uncovered. A confirmation message appeared on the tiny screen before his eyes, asking if he wanted to enter the Dream Drive.

"Yes," he whispered.

The screen switched off and the helmet's machinery came alive, whirring softly. The helmet engaged the signals traveling though his twelve cranial nerves as well as the ones coming into his skull from his spine. He lost his sight, followed by the rest of his senses, one by one. Then he lost all sensation of his body. His body would lie still on his bed, safe under the control of his autonomous nervous system. His mind would receive inputs determined by the program the Dream Drive was running and the resulting experience was utterly indistinguishable from reality.

The technology behind the Dream Drive had been developed by the militaries in order to train their soldiers as well as allow their battlefield operators smoother control of their war machines. The world had clamored for the tech to be shared for ages, before it finally slipped out, some six years ago.

Lees than a moment passed before he was standing upright in an endless, white space. Two squares were before him. One represented the Hub.

The Hub was a globally shared virtual world and the default location to which everyone was transported by their Dream Drive. It looked like the love child of Shanghai and Las Vegas. Just like the Internet had suffused the world in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the Hub had been all the rage since it had been unveiled to the general public. Every important company in the world had a virtual store in the Hub, where one could shop. The shops combined the best part of online shopping, the search function, with the experience of examining the product just like in a brick and mortar store. The rent for these commercial spaces kept the Hub going and growing.

Private persons could also rent Hub space to create their own fantasies and utopias. Some said that the Hub was the last place where humanity could truly be free, since it wasn't as tightly regulated and scrutinized as the real world. Yuri didn't see the point of freedom if it was only simulated.

Before embarking on his mission, Yuri hadn't had much experience with the Hub, or the Dream Drive. Both were illegal in the Caliphate. Fortunately, his rig bypassed all the technological obstacles the Morality Board's enforcement arm had put up.

When he had started his mission, Yuri had designed his avatar, an average, middle-aged Joe from The States. Everyone else on the Hub modified their avatars to be idealized, or fictional versions of themselves, so Yuri's avatar stood out like a sore thumb.

He had been so caught up with gaming for his invitation that he hadn't realized just how much he stood out until he was well underway and his Followers began appreciating his "honest look". No one was making an issue over his appearance, so he had just shrugged it off and plowed on. He had even begun getting offers from women who wanted to fuck him.

Every activity a human body could experience in reality, it could also have in the Hub. Sex was no exception. Most people had Hub sex precisely to avoid certain aspects of real-life sex, like body odor, imperfect skin and features, or diseases. Chicks offering to have Dream Drive sex with a guy that they could literally find next door in real life didn't quite compute to Yuri, so he had simply ignored them. He had been a man on a mission, after all.

He looked away from the Hub's square. The other square was dark red and had the silhouette of the tree from the game's cover on it. An inverted pentagram was on the tree's trunk. The title of the game was written above the square in black letters.

Yuri nodded at the tree.

Connecting to Crux game server...

Connected.

Welcome, Yuri Yanuk.

Yuri flinched when he found himself in whitespace again. How the hell did Crux know his real name? How could a privately owned company from America possibly see through all his security and trace his connection back to him in an instant? This connection was encrypted by bleeding edge technology. The transmissions his rig used to interface with the satellites were very hard to detect, even by specialized ground stations. Pinpointing and identifying them was next to impossible. It wasn't like he was piggybacking off a neighbor's wireless network.

There should be no electronic link between this connection and his name. None whatsoever.

"Hello there, Alex."

Yuri couldn't dwell on his shock for long because Emil Mohammed was standing right in front of him. Emil's long, black hair hung down past his shoulders. His black and white beard was quite impressive. It reached his robes. Yuri wanted to ask him about his name. A small part of him desperately clung to the hope that he had only imagined it flashing before his eyes in letters that were two feet tall.

"Thanks for participating in the tournament, I'm a prerecorded message from Emil Mohammed."

That put the kibosh on asking about the name. Yuri wondered if he should quit. He had had enough unknowns yesterday to last him a whole year. How a privately-owned company, even a computer related one, could have possibly detected his identity was not one he could afford to juggle as well. He was going to get to the bottom of this mess.

"I wanted to personally introduce the quarterfinalists to the game."

Yuri's jaw dropped when he finally realized Emil's recording was speaking to him in Zibar. Not English, Arabic, French or Spanish. Zibar. And it was flawless, too. No consonants were mangled the way the Arabs usually did. Yuri was stunned by the realization that Crux had known exactly who he had been since day one. Even if Emil Mohammed had ancestors from Yuri's country, there was no way he could learn to speak flawless Zibar in the time span between Yuri missing his quarterfinal match and this copy of the game being shipped. Not even just a few sentences.

And there were no Zibar-speaking apps online. Yuri's dad had been struggling for years to come up with the resources to create the first one.

But, if the man had known exactly who Yuri was, then why was he still addressing him as Alex, his cover identity?

"It's a shame you quit. I was looking forward to seeing you in the finals and finding out if you were keeping any racing skills hidden, like an ace up your sleeve. I know that no one expected you to amount to much in the Tournament. Even as you made it from round to round, you were still pegged as an underdog, despite the large margins of all your wins. When you made it to the finals, everyone agreed your racing game deficiency would stop you in the one-on-one semifinal.

"Personally, I thought that, even if you were as shoddy a racer as everyone thought, this would only balance out your FPS magic. I was sure your matches would be determined by the RTS games. And, boy, do you play an exciting RTS game, or do you play an exciting RTS game." Emil paused and shook his head. "There was something of an uproar on the Hub when you quit. Despite all the pundits discounting you, your Following was dead sure you'd win and prove everybody wrong."

Mohammed grinned. "I think they were looking for a beacon of hope in you and your playing. If you could win, after everyone else said you were going to lose, then maybe their lives could be improved too, despite all obstacles." He shrugged. "Oh, well. It wasn't as if your quitting surprised me."

Mohammed winked at Yuri. "I took the liberty of looking into your gaming record. You seem to have only taken up Hub gaming after I announced that advance copies of Isis would be given to the top sixteen competitors in my tournament. Forgive me if I sound immodest, but I got the distinct impression that every game you played was aimed at obtaining an invitation to my tournament."