New to the story? Start here: Memorial Day Chapter 1: Welcome to Bright Hill

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24 – The Games They Played

He ignored the second ‘new message’ notification for the moment, and started reading Steven’s email again from the beginning.

Based on what he knew—which wasn’t much—he had already guessed the goggles were some kind of countermeasure or protective device.  Logi wouldn’t airdrop a spare set of regular night-vision devices.  He had…at least four spares already, he thought, remembering the pair of small crates in the other room.

He even had older ones based on slightly outdated technology and which took different kinds of batteries, in the unlikely event he ran out of one size of battery.  Those were more rugged, built on more resilient optics or sensors or whatever the actual technology was.  Layers on layers on layers…

He opened the second message from Steven:

 

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TO: c.glossen@bayshorebank.com

FROM: lapotter@cls.windsor.edu

SUBJECT: FW: FW: Func. Check Imagery – 44-SERIES FUSED BNVD ONLY

 

See below

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TO: rte-tl02@rmrs.brighthill.com; ‘DDI List’ <ddi-distro@rmrs.brighthill.com>

FROM: 73b071e5-brighthill_2ecom-int@rmrs.brighthill.com

SUBJECT: FW: Func. Check Imagery – 44-SERIES FUSED BNVD ONLY

ATTACHMENT: [28-181-44rev4_Test_Image_v2.2.png] [cal_Image_PSQ44-FINAL.png] [Checklist-PSQ-44Rev2.docx]

 

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He opened the checklist document.  It wasn’t very informative, but instructed him to open the images and look at them through the modified goggles, look away, and repeat that process several times.  It didn’t explain what to do if they didn’t work, only that the “Test Image” should not be visible on the eyepiece screens.

He went to open the first of the images.  He paused.  His finger hovered over the laptop’s touchpad, and had to ask himself why.

He’d done enough risky things for Bright Hill to intuitively know there would be some kind of warning, something to tell him if the images were hazardous to look at with the naked eye.  But still he made himself think through it, choosing caution over complacency.

Eventually, after perhaps a minute, he satisfied himself and opened the first file.

At first it appeared to be a plain blue square.  After staring at it for a moment a second blue became apparent: not brighter or darker but adjacent to the background in a way he couldn’t articulate.  It gave him the impression of a shape he couldn’t name or even adequately describe.

Out of curiosity, he opened the second file.  This one could not have been more different.  It reminded him of a test pattern or something similar; nine brightly-colored blocks with a sharply contrasting number in each one.

He finally powered on the goggles and saw the eyepieces light up.  Without a helmet on, he was forced to hold them up to his eyes like binoculars.

He almost regretted looking through them.  What he saw was so disconcerting he had to lower them again a second later.

He blinked a few times, and raised them to his eyes again.

The base model devices were familiar to him, but these were not.  He saw the living room in true color, not the muted greenish-gray of his regular pair.  But these were like watching a slideshow—the image only updated once or twice a second.  He was barely moving, sitting there comfortably on the sofa, but his brain insisted his head and eyes were moving, and the display lagged behind even those small movements.

That was going to be an issue if he had to wear these for any length of time.

He held them to his eyes and stood.  He had to do it carefully; what his brain said was happening didn’t match what he was seeing.

Taking a cautious step forward, he realized he didn’t know how to shift his weight properly.  The vestibular sense of motion came before the image updated, and he wobbled in place with both feet firmly on the carpet.  He had to lower them—that was disorienting in itself—before he sat back down on the sofa.

He still didn’t know what they actually did except make it difficult to move.  He opened the image of the blue square, and held the goggles up to look through them.

Half of the laptop screen disappeared behind featureless black pixels, shifting around, appearing and disappearing as his head moved slightly.  The blue square and some of the screen around it were completely hidden behind them.

It made a small amount of sense to him then.  He wasn’t the most technically-literate person, but he knew real-time censoring of live video wasn’t easy.  He looked up at the cardboard-covered TV, then down again, and saw the black pixels appear to cover the blue square on the laptop screen.

He opened the second image, the one with the brightly-colored squares, and looked at it.  The squares and numbers looked the same—lower in resolution, he noticed, but everything was visible.  He looked up and back down, and nothing changed.

He wrote back to Steven, acknowledging the goggles worked.  That seemed optimistic to him, and he thought about including something flippant, but didn’t.  They worked as far as he knew, and he trusted Tech Services as much as he trusted anyone else.  Worrying about it wasn’t helpful.  Suggesting to Steven that he was worried was even worse.

In the storage room, he clipped the modified goggles to his helmet and strapped it on.  He moved to the open area between the living room and the kitchen, and carefully practiced walking back and forth.

After a few minutes, he found it wasn’t much easier.  But like moving around blindfolded, after some practice the overwhelming disorientation gave way to…significant difficulty.  He kept at it for half an hour, and while he was pleased he didn’t fall even once, he recognized it was not the sort of thing that was ever going to become easy or comfortable.

What he eventually came up with was a strategy of standing still, carefully looking about, and then closing his eyes to take six or ten careful steps.  He could walk with his eyes open, but it was almost easier not to.  He found it more disorienting to watch the world go by as a slideshow than it was to walk blindly.  In that way, he thought of the goggles as a force multiplier: they didn’t fix anything, they were just another tool in his toolbox.

Having formulated this strategy, he practiced it.  Testing himself by trying to navigate around the apartment, first by carefully scanning through the goggles and then walking blindly.  He didn’t even want to think about trying to fight in these, and he didn’t bother training that.  Moving tactically and choosing angles, for the few seconds he could see before he moved, was going to have to be good enough.

He decided to loosely schedule several practice sessions a day, making them more challenging as he went.  He wrote numbers on sticky notes and blindly affixed them to the walls, using them to gauge how quickly he could slink into a room, scan it, and identify the numbers.  It reminded him of the games they played at the range sometimes, forcing shooters to think on their feet under stress, to engage different parts of the brain.

He only managed a dozen practice sessions before the laptop rudely interrupted him one afternoon, chiming its ‘new message’ alert at him.