And then the landscape transformed around him. They weren’t in the arena anymore. They were in a vast, rolling green field.
Tom blinked, and blinked again. The field was still there, stark and clear as day. “What just happened?”
“You’ve got a neural processor now,” Vik answered. “Get it? The computer has direct control of the signals from your optic nerve.”
Then Tom understood: his brain was being fed a false image like with the nutrient bars at breakfast.
“So none of this is here,” Tom said, scuffing the heel of his boot experimentally on the grass. He even smelled it!
“The arena you saw? That’s real. This field is just the processor fooling your eyes. The sounds you hear, the wind you feel? All fake,” Vik said. “Basically, this is an attempt to make exercise more of an educational activity. Most of the exercise scenarios are based on real battles. You learn some things about military history without them needing to actually teach you.”
A chill breeze cut across Tom’s skin, rippled through his hair. The grass squished beneath his boots, and the milky morning sun seared into his eyes. Tom began to smell the acrid smoke that was floating in dark wisps from over the distant horizon. He could even hear the murmurs of voices from somewhere across the field and feel the ground vibrating with the thumping of thousands of footsteps.
He strained his eyes, trying to see the real arena through the illusion, but he couldn’t. “If we can’t see the real world, how do we avoid bumping into stuff?”
“The illusion adapts to the actual arena,” Vik said. “A river in place of the pool. Boulders in place of low walls, cliffs in place of the climbing walls, that sort of thing. By the way, you’ll want to stretch and then start jogging while you can. Calisthenics always starts with the cardiovascular component for phase one.”
Tom glanced around at the rest of the plebes, dispersing from the main body, spreading out across the battlefield. They were all stretching and darting anxious looks over their shoulders. Tom glanced back toward the rolling hillside, wondering what they were waiting for.
“What happens next?” he asked Vik.
“Incentive to start sprinting.”
Tom stretched, wind ripping against his cheeks, his heart picking up several beats. The distant welter of voices rose. He saw the plebes quit stretching abruptly and break into a flat run.
Screams filled the air. Tom looked back toward the hillside, and his breath caught as he saw the “incentive to start sprinting.” Thousands of men in tartans were spilling over the hillside, shouting a ferocious battle cry, swords flashing in fists.
This is so cool, Tom thought for one dazzled moment.
A spear whizzed by his face, and his survival instincts kicked in and reminded him he was unarmed in front of a raging horde of medieval Scotsmen. He broke into a run, the screams behind him splintering his ears. Another spear whizzed past him and careened with a solid thunk in the grass. Tom swerved around it, his heart pounding, and he reminded himself that this wasn’t real. He wasn’t in danger. This was an illusion.
He forgot that when he heard a shrill scream. Tom glanced back in time to see that Beamer had fallen behind into the clasp of the Scottish warriors. A Scotsman drove a sword through his gut.
“Aaah!” Beamer screamed, thrashing on the ground. “The pain. The terrible pain!”
“Oh God, no, Beamer,” Vik cried, anguished. He grabbed Tom by the collar. “For God’s sake, run faster. Run faster or that will be your fate, too!”
Tom’s easy assurance this wasn’t dangerous evaporated into real fear. Vik was panicking, Beamer had screamed like he was being killed. Was something wrong with the simulation? This wasn’t supposed to be like real battle with people being killed, was it?
He was heaving for breath by the time he skidded to a stop before a solid rock wall with ladders attached to it. That’s when the scenery shifted around him, and he saw Beamer again, standing at the base of a wall, doubled over in laughter.
“Vik, did you see new guy’s face?” Beamer crowed.
Vik bellowed a laugh and socked Tom’s shoulder. “Poor Tom. You really thought he got gutted, huh? Nah, Beamer just bailed on the workout and let them kill him. He’s lazy that way.”
Beamer nodded proudly.
Yuri had skipped the ladders and chosen to scale the rock wall itself. He was already halfway up, but he paused to look down at them and shook his head. “That was not a nice prank to play on Tim.”
Tom understood then: the battlefield really was just a sensory illusion. You couldn’t actually feel anything in an illusion. Beamer had faked the agonized death, and Vik had gone along with it.
“You’re still a funny guy,” Tom told him.
Vik began to hoist himself up the wall. “This is phase two, interval training. You going to die again, Beamer?”
“No way am I climbing up that,” Beamer grumbled, surveying the looming stone wall.
“See you in the next life—or rather, the strength training segment. Come on, Tom.”
Tom followed Vik up the ladders, leaving Beamer behind to the angry Scotsmen. In the real world, this was one of those climbing walls he’d seen. Here in the simulation, it resembled the wall of a castle of sorts. Tom scrambled up the rungs of the ladder, engaging a new set of muscles, and found himself jerking up toward medieval English soldiers waiting at the top, cursing them for being “scurvy barbarian invaders.”
When they reached the top of one wall, another wall presented itself. Behind him, Tom heard more battle cries. He looked back and saw that the massive army of angry Scotsmen was climbing up the walls, too, still chasing them. Beamer got—or rather, let himself be—impaled again. He didn’t fake scream this time. He dropped onto the ground and waved lazily up at Tom and Vik.
Up and down the ladders they were chased, until Tom was heaving for breath. The Scotsmen pursued relentlessly. And then Tom met the rest of the plebes in a four-walled armory. He followed them, seized a sword off the wall, and nearly dropped it. It was unexpectedly heavy.
“How do you fight with this?” Tom asked Vik, hoisting it up with two hands.
“You don’t fight, really. Lifting it. That’s the point of phase three: strength training.”
Screams pierced the air. Tom braced himself for whatever was coming next.
Japanese ronins rushed into the room.
Tom started laughing. It made no sense having Japanese ronins in a medieval English castle under siege by Scotsmen, but he didn’t care. He hurled himself into fighting with the heavy sword. He ignored the fact that blocking the blows from the ronin invariably began to resemble lifting weights in a gym, since the illusion of the fight made it so much better. He saw Vik dodge a sword and spotted Beamer in the corner, getting impaled for a third time. Yuri leaped forward to avenge Beamer and then threw himself gloriously into the battle with two ronins at once, wielding a sword in each hand. Then he heroically stepped between Wyatt and the ronin besieging her and began fighting three ronins, all at once.
“Yuri, stop showing off!” Wyatt snapped at him, shoving him out of her way and taking on the ronin herself again.
And then the ronins faded away, the dank castle walls vanished, and Tom found himself standing in the middle of the arena, heaving for frantic breaths, a thick iron weight clutched in his grip. Yuri had a weight in each of his hands, and he set them on the floor with a plunk. He didn’t even look like he’d broken a sweat.