“Hello?” Opel called on the screen. “I would like to speak with you, but I am not going to wait all day.”
Lulu hit the button. “I’m here,” she said. “I’m the one with the farm. I’m the one with the loot boxes raining on me.”
“Excellent,” Opel said, pushing Cordelia out of the way and sitting at the desk. He leaned in and smiled big. “To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”
“Do not give him your real name,” Roger said.
“Uh, call me Cindy,” Lulu said.
“Cindy?” Sam asked. “You can’t be Cindy. Cindy is Cindy! You should’ve said you were Betty Sue!”
“Fuck off. I panicked!”
Roger let out an angry beep.
“There’s no correction when we’re engaged with the enemy,” Lulu said.
Roger produced a frowny sticker and placed it on the wall by Lulu’s name.
“It is very nice to meet you, Cindy,” Opel said. “Are you truly using a Traducible AI unit to assist you?”
“I would advise against answering that,” Roger said.
Lulu waved Roger away. She hit the button. “I don’t know what that means.”
The man’s lips tightened. “Regardless, Cindy, as you know, the terrorist problem on New Sonora has become untenable, and we have been contracted to remove the terrorists from your planet.”
Lulu leaned forward. I could see the vein on the side of her head starting to pulse, which was never a good sign. “Terrorists? Terrorists of what? We are under quarantine. We don’t have guns. We are all farmers. We have been minding our own business for decades, and you’ve come out of nowhere to kill us. You are systematically killing innocent people. You are using illegal humanlike Peacekeeperrobots to defraud your players, and I am going to make certain everybody knows about all of this.”
Opel smiled again on the screen, and the effect was chilling.
Outside, an explosion came, followed by distant screaming. The entire room shook.
I jumped up, looking around wildly. “What happened? What happened?”
“Rhino number three has been destroyed,” Roger said. “The unit was sitting alone on the road south of base.”
“I just demonstrated our power,” Eli Opel said on the screen. “I used a beam on our ship to destroy one of your large-sized automatons. We have the entirety of your encampment mapped, and we can kill you all at a moment’s notice with zero effort on our part. This includes anyone in your buried shelters. There will be no further warnings. Any hints or threats of further attempts on your part that you’re speaking with anyone off planet other than myself, and I will erase everyone on the entire peninsula from existence, all with the press of a button. This includes direct one-on-one conversation with our customers. Do you understand, Cindy?”
“Shit,” Lulu said.
“I require a response.”
Lulu reached forward and pressed the button. Her arm was shaking. “We understand. What do you want from us?”
On the screen, Opel steepled his fingers. “Very good. You may just survive if you continue to follow instructions. I am going to continue to give you supplies. We have learned not to bother with the remote kill switches, though any weapons and replicators will still have end-of-life programming built in. Do not attempt to disable this limitation. You will continue to build the defenses around your farm. For the next few days, we will allow increasingly larger groups of customers to face you. We will make certain they won’t be more than you can handle, but it will be a challenge. This is an important balance, as we want the game to remain fun for our customers. Do notworry about post-battle Moderator cleanup. We will suspend all Moderator activity in the area.”
“Fun?” I asked, anger rising even more.“Fun?”
Opel continued. “If you don’t want to be replaced by Peacekeepers, I suggest you play your part properly. I dislike having to repeat myself, but I will do so again anyway. Cease your attempts to send messages out. We now have countermeasures in place, and we do not wish to have to destroy the ambassador’s satellite, but we will.”
Lulu and I exchanged a look. I mouthed,Ambassador’s satellite?She shrugged.
“Any attempts at direct conversation with the customers will now be filtered, so do not even attempt it. Any attempts from yourself or anyone on your peninsula will result in immediate reprisal. At the end ofOperation Bounce House’s run, we will allow any and all customers who wish to participate to join the final fight, which will likely be the entirety of the remaining player base. You will fight back. You will likely lose this engagement. However, if you’re smart enough, maybe some of you will survive. It doesn’t matter to me as long as it’s a good fight. If you happen to survive, I promise in return not to target your farm with the cleanup crew. It’ll likely be a dozen or more years before the Republic moves to repopulate, so you’ll have plenty of time to resettle.”
We just sat there in stunned silence.
We should have run,I thought. Mr.Gonzales was right.We should have run.Our only hope at survival was communicating with a sympathetic party on Earth to put a stop to this before they overwhelmed us. If we couldn’t do that, what was left other than just fighting until we were knocked down?
