Chapter 1

A Not So Hostile Takeover

Welcome to the universe.

Organic nanobots have clustered in your brain to connect you and the rest of the human population to our network so that that information may be given directly. Knowledge about the Collective, our rule of law, and how humanity will function within our society will be uploaded directly to your consciousness shortly.

Please remain calm while the delinquents in your society are culled. If you are reading this message, you are not one of the members being culled and need not fear you will be culled. Information has been provided as to why each individual has been culled. This information may be traumatic. We apologize for this.

That’s what I saw the first minute of the first day the Peacekeepers invaded earth and took complete control. It was written in big happy yellow letters, the kind that put you at ease while 5% of your population are summarily executed.

The Peacekeepers were big on putting people at ease. That was the first bit of knowledge they uploaded to my brain. The second was that the masters of this Collective were called the Peacekeepers, clarifying the first confusing fact. The third fact was that no one would miss the 5% they culled.

Those three facts were mashed together, forging an emotional connection to the Collective. It made me feel grateful for their help and distracted me as my HR manager dropped dead, with a long list of infractions above her head.

I was only in her office because she was trying to cancel the vacation I’d asked for six months ago. But I’d given my request to her in writing and made her sign it at the time. That’s the sort of thing you had to do with her. She was small and petty, finding any excuse to make others miserable.

Work didn’t even need me next week.

I checked.

One second, she was trying to weasel out of letting me go, giving longwinded and empty reasons for why I needed to stay, and the next, her fat face was on the desk. By then, I was too distracted to notice. Suddenly seeing words floating before you makes you wonder how the words got there and whether or not you were having some sort of bizarre stroke.

I read the last line, concerned for my health and mental status. Then I dropped my gaze to her corpse. I’m not going to lie, seeing her dead made me feel better.

She looked like she’d gone to sleep, except sleeping people didn’t have paragraphs floating above them. I started reading the reasons she’d been culled. They weren’t the petty tyrant reasons I expected. She’d encouraged three people to commit suicide over the internet, working on them for months. She’d tried to do it with more, a lot more, but failed.

I’d like to say I was surprised by her actions, but I wasn’t. I’d always told Ted she was evil. Now I could prove it.

My gaze switched between the message and her corpse, the absurdity of the situation shielding me from the reality of what was happening. However, my heart rate slowly started to speed up as I realized this may, in fact, not be a dream. Just before I began to panic, I was filled with a serene sense of calm, like everything in the world was perfect.

I wanted to panic. Everything in life that led me to this moment said I should be panicking, but my body and mind wouldn’t let me.

I was calm.

So very, very calm.

I reached over and picked up her arm, feeling her warm oily skin. I checked her wrist for a pulse. I didn’t find one. I let go of her arm and it flopped onto the desk.

I paused, thinking.

The decent thing to do was to try and help. I considered giving her CPR. There was nothing to prove that the accusations floating above her were true besides a gut feeling that they were.

Someone in the hallway shouted.

I calmly turned towards the door. I figured I should see what that was about. Someone might be in trouble, someone who wasn’t trying to kill people over the internet. If they weren’t, I’d come back and decide what I wanted to do.

Before I left, I grabbed the letter she had signed that approved my time off and headed for the door. My name Morgan Bartholomew Winchester and my job description Senior Statistician were printed at the top of the page. I tucked it in my pocket and stepped out into the hallway.

Whiteman’s Toothpaste was far from the biggest toothpaste company in the United States. In fact, the last time it had been in the top 10 was the 1980s. It was also the last time they redecorated the building. Wood paneling and worn shag carpet were so far out of fashion that it would probably come back in if it survived a few more years.

I saw my co-workers down the hall gathered outside the office before mine, muttering to each other. I made my way over, checking the faces and hoping to see concern. I didn’t see any. They were all calm and talking about the words. I squeezed my way through, pretending to be trying to reach my office, but really I wanted to see what the fuss was about.

Ted worked in the office beside me, or at least he had. He was dead, slumped over his keyboard.

I liked Ted.

He’d convince me to help at the soup kitchen with him once a fortnight; afterward, we’d go bowling. We even went out for a beer after work every Friday to bitch about HR. And we swapped memes at least once a day. So I was shocked to see him dead and read the reason why they killed him. He was the last person I’d expect to be a serial killer. But the names of the people he’d killed and the locations of their bodies were there for everyone to see. Apparently, he’d been using the soup kitchen to find his victims.

Did that make me an accessory?

No, probably not since I was still alive.

At worst, it made me gullible.

As the seconds ticked by, more information was uploaded to my brain. All of a sudden, I knew that the dead were murderers, rapists, Karens, Kyles, crooked politicians, and even more crooked corporate types. Not everyone who fell into these categories was being executed, only those who were the worst offenders or possessed no ability to change.

I was way too calm for what was going on. So was everyone else. Except for that one shout, everyone was acting like nothing out of the ordinary was happening. The Peacekeepers must have been doing something to our brains to help ease us into the universe at large and humanity no longer being in charge of its fate.

It should have been unsettling, but I couldn’t get worked up enough to feel that way.

More information trickled in, and I discovered the Peacekeepers were big on using the carrot instead of the stick. They didn’t want to hurt us. They wanted to help us. But that help came at a price. We had to earn it. We had to play the Great Game.

Janet, another of my co-workers, turned to me. She was in her 40s and advertising it. She had her grey blonde hair tied in a mom bun and a blouse with a small peanut butter stain on the shoulder. She’d been passed over for promotion so many times she’s given up trying. She was actually happier now than when I’d started working here.

“I think we’re supposed to go home,” she said, sounding like her own statement confused her.

I found myself nodding. “They’re going to connect us to the Great Game.”

Janet pointed to the window. “Look, they’re beginning the conversion.”

Ships shaped like grey potatoes the size of towns had come down through the clouds over Portland. Hundreds of thousands of tiny drone potatoes spread from them like flocks of starlings, off to start their work.

“You should go pick up your kids,” I said calmly.

“Dan’s on his way to get them.” She frowned, confused. “How did I know that? This is strange.”

“Very strange.”

It occurred to me as Janet walked away that I’d lost my job. The odds of me still having it when I got back from my holiday were low. I’d been aware that a computer program was going to take it at some point. I’d never guessed it to be an alien computer program.

I decided to clean out my desk.

I stepped into my office, a cramped room that was barely big enough to let someone sit on both sides of my desk, and pick up the two personal photos I had there. One was my last family picture with my parents and brothers before my mom died. The other was of Buster when he was a puppy, back when he was a cute ball of fluff.

Buster was now 14, which was old for a golden retriever. He was nearing the end of his life. I was trying to make the time we had left count.

The information flooding my mind started to explain what the Great Game was. It wasn’t a game. It was business, adventure, and war. An entire galaxy set up for sentient species to interact with through robotic avatars. It was only a game because it wasn’t permanent. Our avatars could be destroyed, but we wouldn’t be harmed. We wouldn’t even be there full time. There seemed to be some sort of cycle where everyone in the Collective connected for 53 hours and then disconnected and went about their everyday lives for 106. It was like a reverse weekend.

And after the first 100 cycles in-game, we wouldn’t have to connect unless we wanted to. But we would want to. The rewards for participation filled my head. If I’d been able to feel awe, I would have felt it with every cell in my body.

There was something called Tokens. I could earn them for playing the Great Game. If I won enough, 100,000 to be exact, I’d be able to buy Buster a rejuvenation treatment, a medical procedure that would give him back his youth, adding another decade onto his lifespan. That was reason enough for me to want to play. But there were hundreds of thousands of other miracles I could purchase. So many that I knew I wouldn’t be able to acquire it all even if I spent the next millennia playing.

The nerd in me began to wonder why this Collective didn’t just use virtual reality if they were so advanced. No sooner did I have that thought than the answer came. They had. A very long time ago. A race had managed to upload a virus. In the space of a few seconds, 86% of the sentient beings in the universe were turned into vegetables.

They didn’t want to repeat this experience, so instead of virtual reality, they used avatars far away with a bunch of safety systems, so we weren’t networked.

It was all very strange.

I made my way to my car, following the impulse to go home, still thinking about the fact that at some point, the majority of sentient life in the universe was killed by the Great Game and wondering what it was like before that happened.

I started the engine, gave it thirty seconds to warm up and stop screeching, and then headed out of the parking lot, moving into the long line of cars that had formed. Traffic was bad. The worst I’d ever seen. Everyone was trying to go home at the same time. Potato drones flew overhead as I slowly crawled down the freeway to my parents.

For once, I wasn’t upset by the traffic. I wasn’t upset by anything. I passed more than a dozen cars with dead bodies inside. People were walking out of buildings with dead bodies, only to dump them in the street for collection. They carried on like it was completely ordinary.

About the third time this happened, I remembered my HR manager. And that I was meant to go back and perform CPR. Almost an hour had passed at this point, so the odds of her coming back were precisely zero.

I kept driving, wondering how I’d forgotten about her, before getting distracted.

My dad had Buster during the day. When mum passed away, he took early retirement. Her passing had really mellowed him out. He wasn’t the high-strung workaholic he’d been all my life, but he was lonely. He complained about me leaving Buster with him because real dogs should be able to handle being alone for a few hours, but he’d been happier since I started dropping him off. That’s why I did it. It wasn’t to save money on doggy daycare like I told him. Dropping Buster off at his place added an hour to my daily commute.

I headed out of the city and into the suburbs, parking on the road in front of my parents’ place because Peter and Simon were parked in the driveway. My parent’s house was an old-school American dream home. There was a white picket fence, a front yard with an oak tree, a bigger backyard, four bedrooms, and two bathrooms. The garage fits two cars and the lawn always looked freshly mowed. There were even rose bushes and flower beds and a sprinkler system that you can set your watch to.

Dad was waiting for me with Peter and Simon when I got to the front door. My brothers and I take after him. When you put us side by side, people sometimes mistake us for triplets. We’re all six-one, with dark brown hair and the exact same cowlick. All of us have the same year-round tan, same big jaw, and large squashed nose. Our eyebrows and eyelashes were the only features we inherited from our mother. They were thick and luscious and perfectly proportioned to our faces. I’d been told by several women that they helped distract from the terrible nose we’d inherited.

None of us had taken mom's passing well. None of our relationships had survived it. Peter had even been engaged. The only good thing to have come from it was we were all much closer as a family.

They all hugged me a little too tight as I entered. I hugged back just as hard. We all needed reassurance against the illusionary calm that gripped us.

Buster seemed to sense something was wrong and went from person to person to offer affectionate hand licks to improve their mood. He wasn’t as energetic about it as he used to be. The love was there, but the energy was gone.

He reminded me of mom near the end. They way she loosely held my hand, unable to grip tight, because she didn’t have the strength left.

Dad gathered us all in the living room. He’d done some redecorating since mum passed. Swapping out her fancy lounge suite from France for a three-seater tan leather couch and matching La-Z-Boys, so he could watch the game in comfort. They were easier to fall asleep in, and if you spilled dip or beer, you could wipe them clean without any fuss. With mom’s couches, we’d lived in a constant state of fear that we might drop something on them, even dad, which is why they were the first thing to go.

He took a seat in his chair, and my oldest brother Peter took the other, leaving me and Simon stuck on the couch.

Dad smiled at us, causing the wrinkles around his eyes to scrunch. The smile was full of fear, sadness and whole lot of love. “I’m not sure what is going to happen next, but I want you boys to know I love you,” his gravelly voice trembled with emotion. “These memories that keep flowing into my head seem to tell of a kind people who don’t want to cause more harm than they absolutely have to, a people who survived a war that could have destroyed our universe and never want to see this happen again which is why they are conquering us. But I’m a pessimist. When this started, I was walking Buster and watched a man calmly pull his car to the side of the road and drop dead. I saw what he was guilty of, and if it is true, it’s better that he is gone. But it may be a lie. And if it is a lie, there is nothing I can do to fight back. There is nothing I can do to save you. So I want you all to know I love you and that I will never stop loving you.”

We got all touchy-feely as the time counted down. We shared fun memories that had us all smiling. We were too calm to laugh. The information coming to me told me that we would all go to sleep, even Buster. Our bodies would go into a natural hibernation that would leave us hungry and a little thirsty when we woke.

We stayed in the living room. If this was the end, we wanted to be together. If what the knowledge was telling us was true, we wanted to be together even more. We all knew when it was time because exhaustion overtook us. My dad got out of his chair and kissed us on the forehead. He hadn’t done that since we were kids.

As I closed my eyes, the last sensation I had was my father’s tear-stained lips brushing my forehead.