Chapter 27
World War II, Virtual Reality
“Bogey at eight o’clock!” The B-17 top gunner said from his dorsal observation bubble armed with dual .50 caliber machine guns. He started firing at the fast German Me-109 fighter as it passed over them in a blur.
“I got two more here!” the gunner from the belly bubble turret said, firing at the German interceptors.
Pings of machine gun rounds hitting the tail section could be heard.
Joe went into the cockpit. “This is a waste of time.”
“Leave the game then!” the pilot said without turning around. “We can find plenty of targets to drop our egg on, but we gotta get there in one piece first!”
“No, that is not what I mean. This dogfight will be over in six seconds and then you will experience some turbulence, which may be severe. Everyone should fasten their seat belts immediately.” Then Joe latched onto the back of the co-pilots seat with both hands.
“Why would you say all that is going to happen?!” the co-pilot asked.
Suddenly the plane felt like it was almost taken apart. It shook extremely hard.
The co-pilot said, “We’re losing altitude!”
“I’m trying to pull up!” the pilot said. “She’s not responding!”
Then the sky was extremely calm and looked different.
The pilot looked around and asked, “Any sign of those bogeys?”
“Negative,” various crew members responded.
The co-pilot asked, “Why would we disappear from a dogfight like this?! Hey! That’s what you said would happen!”
“Bombardier to pilot, the topography does not match map coordinates. I don’t get it. My navigation equipment here is going crazy.”
Joe told the pilot, “You’ve entered a different VR world.”
“Huh?” the co-pilot said. “We can’t do that.”
The pilot turned and just looked at him.
The co-pilot said, “I don’t get it.”
“You are in Slobbovania,” Joes said.
The co-pilot said, “You mean that game for ultranerds? What is happening here?”
Joe said, “I reloaded us into Slobbovania. I thought that you would be able to comprehend that statement.”
“You can’t do that! Can he do that?! How can he do that?!”
“Yeah,” Mawuli pulled out a .45 caliber pistol. He smiled and said, “That’s where we are.”
“Accessing . . .” Joe said, “Pilot, turn 76 degrees right.”
The pilot said, “I’m the pilot here! Tell me what is going on!”
Joe said, “I brought you here to bomb a target in this world.”
“What?!” the pilot said. “That is wrong on so many levels! I’m not doing it! Take us back!”
“If you don’t complete the bombing or try to log out, I will hack your account and change your rank in the game back to private.”
Mawuli added, “Or I could just shoot you. Pay attention to my warning. I am a very bad man; at least in VR.”
The pilot asked Joe. “Okay, who are you, exactly?”
The co-pilot said to the pilot, “Look at what he did. He took over a bomber with a nuke on board and moved it to a completely other VR world. Changing our ranks would be no problem for him; and the other guy could definitely just shoot us.”
The pilot said, “I say we better just do it. I don’t feel like turning my account back to private. Besides, who cares if we nuke this place?”
“Fine. So we nuke a bunch of ultra nerds. The allies won’t miss one bomb. Turning seventy-six degrees right. Still, what a waste of a nuke.”
Joe said, “Now you must make the course 81 degrees right, because the settings changed while we were talking.”
“Eighty one degrees right, says the guy who is not even looking at a map,” the pilot said to the navigator.
The B-17 banked heavily to the right.
Joe said, “Target in 36 miles.”
After about five minutes the plane was approaching the target.
Joe said, “Tell the bombardier to look for a large castle and adjust three degrees right.”
“What?!” the pilot shouted, “Either you are some kind of really vindictive nerd, or just plain weird! Adjusting course! Of course you already knew that, so I didn’t need to repeat it back.”
“Try to focus on the task at hand,” Joe said. “Remember your rank in the game.”
“Bombardier, target is a large castle,” the pilot relayed.
“Roger that, Sir. Very little cloud cover here. Not sure of the wind compensation factor on this big boy though. . . . Okay, Target acquired, I guess. Whatever. It’s a nuke. How can we miss? Seems like overkill. Bombs, I mean, bomb away.”
The pilot opened the throttle wide open and was trying to climb to escape the nuclear blast. “It won’t climb! This is not good!”
Joe said, “It appears this world has a much lower ceiling than WW2VR. There is some air travel here, but nothing high altitude. You can increase speed, but I’m certain we won’t escape the blast.”
The nuke exploded on the ground, irradiating the entire area of the Roxzak’s castle. The atomic blast’s tall mushroom cloud disintegrated the bomber and vaporized all of the avatars on the bomber.
*******
Zona could hear Brandon in his room furiously screaming at the game and throwing and slamming stuff around. Zona knew that something major had happened, but she was unaware of the inter-world virtual nuclear attack where Brandon was ground zero.
This same scene of player outrage was repeated in millions of homes because the players were blocked out of their addictive alternate realities that were almost like a life support system to them. The Slobbovanian administrators kept the incident secret. Slobbovania was temporarily shut down for “maintenance” until the administrators could figure out what to do to prevent objects from being moved from one world to another and to prevent the breaches such as Joe had exploited. This situation also caused WW2VR and other sites operated by the same companies to also be shut down until they could also produce better security.