"We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done." — Alan Turing
 

Death and Friendship. Love and Gaming. Mind and Machine. The Meaning of Life. High School Graduation. The End of the World. That Kind of Stuff.

 

We Can Be Heroes

If you press them, anyone who games will admit to some variation on the idea of how they'd love to be the hero for real, just once. Just for one day. But right now, I'm on an empty street five hundred kilometers from home, barely able to walk. I'm soaked and shivering, wearing someone else's clothes, and with way too many memories of almost dying rattling around in my head. And right here, right now, all I can think about is what I'd say if anybody asked me how much I want to be a hero.

I try to focus. I need to bring the previous days into some sort of relief that will let me sum things up.

"Me and some friends of mine, we got caught up in something. We thought we were beta-playing a game. An online tactical simulation, but the game turned out to be… you know what, that doesn't matter. But none of it was our fault, and now we have something this guy Lincoln wants. A piece of tech. I want to give it back to him, but I can't trust him to leave things alone after that."

"What kind of tech?"

"A Soviet-era mobile weapons platform, whose heuristic on-board systems developed advanced artificial intelligence capability while it sat forgotten in a bunker in Smolensk." Saying it sounds just about as ridiculous as I expect it to.

"I didn't think you wrote fiction." Connor tries and fails to laugh. It's like he has some sort of esophageal deformity that routes all intent to guffaw straight from his lungs to his nose.

"Not fiction. This is the truth…"


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The Three Musketeers

The Exile's Blade

Sidnye (Queen of
the Universe)

We Can Be Heroes

A Prayer for
Dead Kings

Blackheath

The Voices
of the Dead

Tales of the
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One Size Fits All

 

The Language
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Free Fiction

Extras

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This isn’t a story about gaming, though. Not in any important sense, anyway. The story’s about people who happen to be gamers, and about what that means to us, and what difference that made to what happened, and why. The story might have just as easily been about people who happened to play lacrosse or chess or badminton or whatever.

Though if it was, things would have turned out quite badly, I expect. And this would be a bit about listening to a badminton game. Between you and me, we’re all better off this way.

This is a story about gamers. But there are only a few places where that really matters..…