This Fighting Must End

It looked and felt and smelled and hurt like a war, but it wasn't. It was a manufactured dream. It took place in a swimming pool of yellow oil. Two people were submerged, each wearing a sort of scuba suit with technology veining through it. Each person's eyes, ears, nose and mouth was covered by a black mask known as a squid—it filtered oxygen in, carbon dioxide out, delivered data to the sense organs. Running along each person's back was an external, lit-up spine, part technology and part synthetic tissue—the players' interface to the AI and, when the session was over, their lifeline back the world.

The players twitched and drifted in the yellow pool, utterly gone in a mental reality, reacting to it, making choices in it. These reactions and choices were read by the skin suit and meta-spine, transferred to and from an AI system, and fed back into the players' neural systems as movement, speech, sensation.

The experience had begun a week ago with days of painful preparation—the meta-spines fusing themselves to skin and vertebra. Then came a day of "priming"—the two men marinating in the charged oil, unconscious, subjected to strange chemistries and wavelengths. Memory softening down to almost non-existent levels. New memories, part historical and part fictional, seeping in and dominating. And just now, the men had been awakened.

Blake and Janson were business partners, successful, middle-aged, married. Wanting something disruptive in their lives. They'd each paid $30,000 for a three-day stint in World War II. The simulated world was accurate and complete in every detail, from the grit of soil to the temperatures of sunlight and shade to the countless smells and sounds of a battle-scorched countryside, of wounds and death, of marching and camping, of livestock, hanging laundry, baking bread.

It was 1941 France. Each man found himself in a soldier uniform, marching towards a battle. Exhausted and hardened from almost a year of previous fighting. Not aware of one another yet. On two separate sides in this war, 19-year-old boys who had never met: Blake an American, fighting for the allies, Janson a German, fighting for the Nazis. All the other characters were CGI, but as real as real.

A skirmish broke out. By a turn of events, these two got separated from their units. Among ruined buildings and trees, among craters and bodies, they came face to face. They each saw the enemy personified. The conflict of nations had reduced down to this one-on-one confrontation. Each was willing to kill or be killed for his country's causes.

Although the simulation wouldn't let matters come to actual death. The AI could avert consequences outside the terms of play—by an artful interruption or, in a pinch, by erasing the previous five minutes: rewinding and starting forward again with different variables.

And that's what happened now. Blake, with a shout of crazy joy, had just driven a bayonet into Janson's chest.

The simulation skipped back. Shuffled data. Resumed.

This time Blake came charging with his bayonet, but tripped on a piece of lumber (it wasn't there the first time) and his point missed its target. Yelling. Gunfire. Fire-hot pain cutting through him.

The simulation rewound again. Changed factors. Resumed.

The AI was still taking measure of its players—their capabilities and tendencies, their hesitations, their tenacity. On pass number three, air support roared in, dropping bombs. Each of the soldiers ran a different direction, retracing his route to find and rejoin his regiment.

They'd both escaped with minor wounds. They'd both live to fight another day. They were each welcomed back with slaps on the back and mocking. It was night now. There was food and camaraderie. Joking. A death. A radio broadcast of music from home. A night of singing insects and moans.

In real life, Janson had once slept with Blake's girlfriend. And Blake had once attempted to sell Janson out for half a million dollars. They'd long-since buried their betrayals. They were mature and civilized men.

But that maturity was lost in the brainwash. The buried resentments were not. And purposely. The mutual animus would make this VR experience not just exciting, but meaningful. It would give the adventure the primal aspect this VR operation, RealForReal, was known for.

Several weeks passed in high-speed mode. Ordeals and victories, wounds and honors, interactions with their fellows. Letters from home. The two submerged figures jerked like fish on a line. Then real-time resumed. The two bodies went back to the usual drowsy twitching.

It was a fresh day. The troops were marching. A lone German soldier ducked behind cover in the distance, and Blake saw him. It looked like the same soldier he had almost fought in single combat the day before. He detached from his platoon, sneaked across the wrecked landscape. And sure enough, it was that same opponent. Blake fired and opened chase, pursuing the now-limping Nazi over rough and wild farmland ground.

Blake climbed onto a shed, lay on the roof with his rifle steady for a long-range shot. Waited for his nemesis to rise back into view on the next ridge.

But Janson had foreseen this tactic. He had circled back under cover of brush and ruins, saw his nemesis on the rooftop, hunched at his gunsights. Janson shot him in the back.

The simulation rewound.

This time, no shed.

The chase went on for a long, eventful hour. What adventure! What affirmation of each man's dedication and spirit! What richness of life—the battered landscape with its remains of greenery and homes, the ghastly remains of other battles, the sun at moments cutting through the smoke of nearby battle like divine intent. The thought, similar in both men, "If only she could see me now, wouldn't she be proud?"

And again, one of them killed.

Again a rewind.

Each time this reversion took place, the dreamers in the pool stiffened and jerked. Each seizure more violent than the last.

An engineer and a journalist were watching from the pool's edge.

"Can they physically take that much, Chief?" asked the journalist.

"It's less than optimal," the chief engineer admitted. "But the AI always needs time to learn its particular players. Every person is different. And when the players know one another, especially when there's, shall we say, real-world complexity, the learning curve is steeper. But trust me, we have plenty of safeguards. Call them breaker switches."

"Like, a way to keep the players from trying so hard?"

"Well, we can't really do that. It would defeat the objective."

"So, a way to just stop the game?"

"No, no, no, we can't do that either. We could, but we don't—"

"Then what?"

"Just watch," said the engineer. "We've never had an injury before—and we never will. It's practically impossible."

Another killing. Another rewind. More spasmodic thrashing.

"Can those spine devices take that much flexing?" asked the journalist.

"Of course," said the engineer, growing annoyed. "They're doing it, aren't they?"

The engineer and journalist were viewing it all on a large screen over the pool. They saw the German creeping up behind the American. Taking aim with his handgun. "Turn around," barked the Janson character, in broken English. And the Blake character obeyed, arms raised, his rifle above him.

"Here we go again," said the journalist.

But the Nazi didn't fire. The players faced one another, exhausted. Both of them uncertain. Both faces showing bewilderment.

"Oh, shit!" said the engineer.

A spike of red light flashed down each player's meta-spine. An alarm sounded—subdued in volume, but urgent. Attendants swarmed to the pool's edge. Two divers were strapping on their squid masks.

"Rescue unit, stand by"—a controller's voice over the PA, with measured volume, with calm urgency.

For 30 seconds, the meta-spines alternated between dark and red.

"It's rebooting," said the engineer, cutting off the journalist's question. "This will sometimes happen. Purely an abundance of caution." The spine-lights resumed their rhythmic pulsations of color, but each one retained a steady dot of red.

"It means we're down one safety level," explained the engineer. "But we're still at 200% failsafe. More than enough. We built in double redundancy."

"What happened?"

"Momentary sub-conviction."

"You mean, like, they had a moment of doubt?"

"If you want to simplify it, sure." The engineer was getting annoyed.

The AI now used various tricks to bolster the players' wavering belief. Janson heard his comrades singing a rousing battle song in the distance. A passing supply truck bore a fluttering American flag.

Gritted teeth. Refreshed stamina. Both men injured now. But their ferocity doubled. "You see how the AI uses peripheral detail, circumstantial incident—even injury—sim injury, of course—to coerce the players to desired ends. It's very much like psyops in an actual war, but customized to each individual in the moment. It's a capability we're very proud of." The foes were scrambling and tumbling through sharp rubble without hesitation. Tearing their uniforms and flesh. Tempting bullets with abandon.

The rewinds became more frequent. The memory flushes more partial. Even as circumstances revised themselves, the increased ferocity of one iteration appeared to carry over into the next.

"They're remembering the previous times?" asked the journalist.

"Excuse me," the chief said, and dispensed commands into his wrist device—units, coefficients, protocols—like a surgeon to the staff in an operating room.

The soldiers both appearing dazed, momentarily lost. Looking one another in the eye.

Another reset. Thirty seconds later, each meta-spine showed two red spots.

"Just one failsafe left," said a junior technician.

"I'm sure we're paying you be doing something!" said the chief engineer.

On the big screen we saw POV flashbacks from the soldiers' civilian lives. Janson arguing with his German girlfriend. "You slept with him? With my best friend?" Blake, somewhere in the Midwest, reacting with disbelief and anger: "He sold me out! He betrayed me!"

The drama on the battlefield resumed. Injuries healed. Bewilderment wiped away. Renewed strength. The ferocity and risk-taking ever-increasing.

"That's more like it," said the chief, mainly to himself.

Four American soldiers charged into the scene, taking shots at the German. Blake heard the gunfire coming from behind, turned, and killed his comrades.

"He's mine, you bastards!"

"Less than optimal?" asked the journalist.

"Get them back to their platoons!" shouted the chief. "Give them some R&R! Get some goddamn hookers in there!"

"I wouldn't recommend that," said a woman in a white lab coat. "These soldiers need less time to reflect, not more. The psychic matrix at this point—"

"None of us knows what fucking psychic state these asshole are in. I'm aborting!"

"You could kill them!" said the woman technician.

"That's the least of my worries! They signed a waiver!"

A voice began countdown. The two divers were ready to plunge. Two dozen staff members had accumulated beside the pool. Medics stood ready with carts of blinking, beeping, tentacled instruments.

"Four…three…two…one. Simulation over!"

But the two submerged men continued flexing and twisting in the oil. Each spine now showed three spots of red.

On the overhead screen, an allied regiment stormed in to rescue their fellow. A German regiment stormed in to rescue theirs. The American threw grenades at his rescuers. The German did this same at his.

Astonished, engineers and medics and support staff watched this increasingly personal World War playing out on the overhead monitors. The rewinds were almost constant now. Events became phantasmagoric. The players started each new round looking less and less refreshed. Looking more and more crazed.

"We can't keep up with the backwash," someone shouted.

Alarms bleated through the auditorium. Geniuses shouted theories and equations. A bedlam of louder and louder precision.

"What's backwash?" asked the journalist. The chief engineer looked stunned, as overwhelmed as the AI processors.

"We pull data from physical time," said the chief engineer dully, like he was reciting. "But the flow is one-way. We have error boundaries."

"But?" asked the journalist.

The chief conspicuously held back his answer.

The journalist made a face. Comprehension dawned. "Wait, are you saying these guys are changing history?"

"No, no, no. History can't be changed!" And then: "It can only be scrambled."

"You're saying this fancy paint gun joint could fuck-up the fabric of time?"

The chief didn't seem to hear him.

"You guys can stop this, right? You can pull a plug or something? You've planned for this contingency?"

The engineer was not even watching the screen or the players now. He was half turned around. Seemingly looking for something to look at.

"Just hope those guys stop fighting in the next two or three minutes. That's all it is now. Two schmucks at war. And everyone's told them, including us, that the only way to stop war is war."