Short Story - Gary the Operator

It’s a cold November evening in Indiana. The workshop I’m here for isn’t until tomorrow, so I’m grabbing a drink at a bar and watching the news on a proper TV, like in the old days. I’ve had enough of staring at my phone; for once, I want the big screen. In the booth next to me, two guys are talking loudly. In a conscious effort to keep my phone in my pocket, I tune into their conversation.

“Hey Joe, what’s up, man?”

“Yo, Tony. All good? Man, I have the craziest story to tell you.”

“Did you unearth some other obscure retro game that you’re obsessed with?”

“No, dude, this is actually really interesting. Remember that Gary guy we met at the range a few weeks back? The big guy that wouldn’t shut up about his mil-sim VR games and Metal Gear Solid?”

“You mean ‘Meal Team Six’? The Gravy Seal?” Tony asks, his tone mocking.

“Yeah, him! So listen to this: he messaged me last night to tell me about this VR game he played. Apparently, someone from those mil-sim forums messaged him saying that they’re building a hyper-realistic stealth VR game. Extremely hardcore. The stakes are insane: you make one mistake, and you can never play that build of the game again. The graphics? Supposedly better than reality. So, this guy asks Gary if he wants to play, telling him that if he clears the mission, he could get into a very selective group. Gary, being unemployed and with nothing to do, says he’ll try it.

He receives this game that he has to side-load onto his VR headset. He said the file size was surprisingly small, so he figured there was no way it could have good graphics. Anyway, he loads it up and boots into the game. He goes through a short tutorial where he can see himself in VR, or rather, a version of him that’s 150 lbs lighter and a whole lot stronger. The tutorial is sparse, just teaching him how to pick up objects and move. He did say that the movement and feel were extremely realistic, like he was actually grabbing things. The entire tutorial consisted of delivering medicine to a point on the map while avoiding detection by robots working and patrolling the area. He said the AI was great at making him tense; sometimes he’d get spotted, but if he behaved normally or just froze in place, he wouldn’t always get busted. It takes him a few attempts, but he beats the tutorial and is now ready for this supposed one-of-a-kind scenario.”

“Joe, I think Gary just installed malware on his VR headset under the pretense of playing a crappy game.”

“That’s what I thought, too, but here’s where it gets super interesting. He loads into the scenario and is surrounded by snow. The best-looking snow he has ever seen. He said it genuinely looked and felt real. He makes a snowball and plays around a bit before getting a notification. His objective is to grab three nearby boxes and place them at specific points around a facility. He goes around a bend and sees that the ‘facility’ is more of a small base with three huge towers spread around it. Apparently, the boxes contain a virus that will connect to those towers and hack them to stop them from spreading propaganda. Gary zooms in on the base and sees a lot of robots moving about, some yellow and some red. He gets a pop-up saying the red robots are extremely dangerous and will investigate if they see him carrying anything. Even from a distance, he can see they’re armed.”

“So the graphics were actually good? It wasn’t a scam?”

“Spectacular, dude. Real-life level. His mind was blown. Anyway, he goes full Seal Team Six, planning routes and observing his targets. He notices that the yellow robots tend to move more mechanically and take orders from the red ones. They’re unarmed, but Gary wants to do a clean run and not be detected at all. He grabs the first bag and starts toward the nearest tower. He said it wasn’t too bad since it was up on a hill with mostly yellow robots on the path to it. He just took it slow, avoided being seen, and climbed over a chain-link fence that had been worn down in sections by the brutal snow. He put the bag at the base of the tower and said he noticed the tower glitch a bit when he accidentally put his head through the model while bending down. For a split second, the ominous black monolith was replaced by an equally titanic white pillar before glitching back. He just shrugged it off and went back for the second bag.

This time, he had to either risk traveling through unmarked, snowy land or go through the middle of the base where all the red robots were. Because there were no restarts, he decided the safer option was to go through the base. Gary finally found a use for his thousands of hours playing the Hitman games. Through a lot of waiting, causing distractions, and blending in, he got to the second monolith and placed the bag. There were some red robots at the base, talking to each other, so Gary had to put the bag just out of their view but still close enough to trigger the pop-up. He mentioned overhearing them talk about power output and energy grids but assumed it was just NPC dialogue.”

“I’m surprised he had the patience for this. It must’ve taken him hours.”

“A little over fourteen hours for the entire operation. Turns out there’s a lot of waiting when you can only experience a scenario once. So, he grabbed the third bag, crossed the base again, and made his way to the third monolith. There were more red robots around this time, so he ended up pushing a yellow robot down a flight of stairs to create a commotion. This distracted everyone long enough for him to get to the third monolith, place the bag, and see the ‘HACKING IN PROGRESS’ bar pop up. Once he did that, he got a message saying, ‘Well done. We’ll be in touch,’ or something like that, before he was booted out.”

“I was expecting more explosions or fights, something more dramatic, you know?”

“Yeah, me too, but I guess you had to be a real ghost for this one. Still, he enjoyed it, even though the scenario was kind of weird. Anyway, let me show you this scope I want to get.”

They kept rambling on. I thought the story about the VR game was interesting. On the other side of the bar, the TV showed a news report about a small wind turbine station in Switzerland that was destroyed by strategically placed explosives. They were saying that somehow, a robot was hacked and piloted so expertly that it managed to place all the explosives without being noticed. A few people were injured, and the footage showed wounded security personnel surrounded by a dozen or so dysfunctional robots. The explosions caused an avalanche that affected a village at the base of the mountain. The loss in power generation was already causing political backlash.

I watched the footage of the twisted metal and the emergency crews working in the deep snow. In the reflection on the bar’s dark TV screen, I could see Joe and Tony laughing at something on a phone. Two guys in a bar, just telling a story.

“Spectacular, dude. Real-life level,” Joe’s voice echoed in my memory.