Exit Game

By Vidit Chopra

Captivate Tech and it’s anonymous evil genius founder, Genie, have created a perfect simulated reality. With Genie hiding behind a digital avatar and the majority of the world using the company’s products for recreation, there are only a few doubting their true intentions. It is now up to Ahmed, the most prominent voice against Captivate Tech’s technologies, to figure out Genie’s truth and Captivate Tech’s plans.

Ahmed finds himself facing challenges that make him sway unpredictably between facts and fiction. With every layer he tries to peel and uncover, he finds himself facing more uncertainty and danger.

As the clock ticks by and in this race against time, will Ahmed be able to figure out the complicated maze? Will he be able to unmask the real Genie and learn what is he up to?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Dec 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781543707397

Vidit Chopra

Vidit Chopra is a technology entrepreneur. He has worked as a consultant and is actively working to enable a technology first progressive future. An avid sports fan, he is always checking the schedule for the next blockbuster game Exit Game is his third work of fiction and first in the science-fiction genre.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

‘Sat images confirm that Jalilov was seen in the compound of this residential complex.’ Satellite imagery appeared on the giant screen in the room, and Jalilov’s picture appeared next to it. Max saw the big broad frame of Jalilov, a bald head, and sinister eyes with a huge scar across his forehead. Jalilov’s street name was ‘the Butcher’. Nobody knew how he got that name, but it had stuck with him for more than a decade.

‘He is in possession of sarin that he is going to supply to the resistance forces against the democratic republic. We can confirm that the deal has been struck, and the exchange is supposed to happen in this same residential complex in the next forty-eight hours,’ Alia said, laying down the key information about the team’s next mission.

She was an analyst working with the special ops team for the past eight years. She was the point of contact for Bravo-5 and briefed them about their missions.

‘The intel confirms the men in this building are twelve in number and are living with their families. We need to eliminate the men, with minimal civilian casualty. It is in our best interest that the resistance be brought down.’ Alia continued.

Max was intently listening to the instructions being given out. He looked to his left and saw his Bravo-5 teammates also listening in before looking back at Alia and the giant screen showing images of the residential complex.

‘Since we will be operating in a foreign territory, we don’t have the clearance to send in multiple units to execute. Bravo-5, your mission is to go in, execute the men in their strong hold, retrieve the sarin, and get out as quickly as possible. Questions?’ Alia said and paused.

‘How accurate is your intel about the number of men in the building?’ Bob asked. He was the team lead who had successfully completed more than 100 such missions in his ten years of service. Whatever he said during the mission was followed to the T by his team.

‘Fairly accurate. We expect around six civilians apart from the twelve men who are on our list. The residential compound could also be booby-trapped, and we need to be careful when we go in and come out,’ Alia explained.

‘How much time do we have before the forces show up?’ Bob asked.

‘The military will identify the usage of their restricted airspace in a minute, but for them to figure out and pass on the orders, we expect you will have forty-five minutes to sweep the place and get out before the forces arrive,’ Alia answered.‘Forty-five minutes to kill the men, making sure the civilians, i.e. their family, isn’t harmed, find the chemicals, bring them back to the chopper,’ Bob said with a smirk on his face.

‘It’s a suicide mission,’ Paige intervened. She was the other member on the Bravo-5 team and was a total badass. She had to be twice as competent as anyone else in the room to have the opportunity of being in a special ops ground unit.

‘Yeah. Yeah, it is. That’s why it’s given to us,’ Bob replied, knowing fully well that it was his team that could convert a suicide mission into a successful one with minimal casualties. He lit up a cigarette and looked up at Max.

‘Do you have any questions, rookie?’ Bob asked Max.

Max had just transferred into the team from the military, where he had completed multiple missions, and was scouted by the head of special ops division to bring him into their fold.

Max shook his head and said, ‘When do we do this?’

‘Tonight. Your gear is already in the chopper,’ Alia replied.

‘Let’s go,’ Bob said as Paige, Max, and Adam followed him.

Adam was the final member of the team, but he wasn’t much of a talker. He was the workhorse whom Bob relied on the most. He knew whatever he said, Adam would follow it without question or scrutiny.

At 2350, they were in the chopper as Max saw Adam sitting next to him, all geared up and ready for the descent next to the Butcher’s residential complex.

Another ten minutes in and they were now almost at the recon point. They put on their night-vision goggles as the streets below were entirely dark.

‘Thirty seconds out,’ the pilot said into the headsets.

With the goggles on, they could finally see the building down below, and as they entered the final phase of their descent, the building that they had seen a few hours ago in the briefing was now right in front of them.

As soon as they closed in, they saw a guy run inside from right outside the compound of their target. The lookout.

‘Time for some action,’ Bob said as the team climbed out of the chopper and saw it disappear in the night.

Bob peered at the door that was just shut in by the man who ran inside one of the buildings in the compound. He fired at the door as it opened up. The man, who had just ran, was holding a gun, ready to shoot, but Bob was equal to the task, eliminating him with his M4A1 rifle.

Max could see another man in the room with a rifle. Bob was about to shoot when Max took him down with his own M4A1.

‘Good shot, rookie,’ Bob said.

Adam moved in to sweep the room.

‘The room is clear,’ he said on the comms after sweeping it.

‘Two down,’ Paige mentioned on the comms.

They moved towards the entry door of the next room that was shut. Adam burst it open as a woman ran through the passageway to the adjacent room.

They went through the passageway and saw the woman with a pistol in her hand, ready to shoot at them. Max took his shot before she could take hers.

A child, who appeared to be in his teens, howled and sat on the ground, covering his face. The fear was apparent in his body language.

‘Hands where I can see them!’ Paige shouted, making sure that the child didn’t have a gun on him.

Max and Bob headed towards the next room, and as soon as they entered, they saw a child lying in bed on the far-right corner of the room with his mother calming him down. As soon as they moved in, she also took out a pistol to shoot and was brought down by Bob. The child ran towards the mother to grab her as Max stood by just in case the child picked up the pistol. The child hugged her mother and started crying inconsolably.

‘Clear,’ Max said over the comms as they moved on to sweep the rest of the place. They exited the first complex and headed for the second inner complex that had a big locked entrance blocking their way in.

Paige installed a small charge on it and tripped it as soon as she was a few feet away from the entrance.

In five seconds, the door blew open as the four of them moved in.

This complex was where ‘the Butcher’ was expected to be.

After a small alleyway, they were at the entrance with lights coming on in different rooms in the three-storied building.

As soon as they were at the main door, shots were fired from the other side of the door, creating holes that were visible to Max through his night-vision glasses.

Adam shot back at it as they heard a body fall inside. The door came open, and they moved in.

Bob took the charge as Max followed right behind him. There was another pathway that opened into multiple rooms inside. The man Max had shot at was lying dead on the floor.

‘Take the one on the left. I will take the one on the right. Adam and Paige, sweep the ones ahead,’ Bob delivered orders as his team followed.

Max opened the first door on the left of the pathway and slowly moved in, looking at everything through the viewfinder of his rifle.

He could hear movement inside when he was opening the door with somebody running to the adjacent room as soon as the door opened.

Max’s viewfinder found another woman and a child who were hugging each other. They shouted as soon as they saw the gun pointed at them.

‘Civilians found,’ he said on the comms and moved to the adjacent room.

It was the bedroom, and as he slowly moved in, looking closely through his viewfinder, he finally saw a man with an AK-47 in his hand. As soon as Max’s frame was visible, the guy started firing incessantly. Max neutralised him with a single headshot as soon as he found a window to shoot.

‘Man down,’ he said on the comms and moved back out of the room.

‘Time to put these assholes in the dark. Cut off the power.’ Bob delivered his order over at the comms as Adam tripped the mains.

The entire complex went dark, but with their night-vision goggles, it had zero impact on Bravo-5’s visibility.

‘Ground floor is clear,’ Bob confirmed on the comms. They made their way towards the first floor through the stairs inside the building.

‘Be careful on the stairs. There could be booby traps,’ Bob declared. They slowly ascended the flight of stairs, careful of every step they took.

The stairs didn’t go straight up but had a turn in between, and they had no way to know if somebody was waiting for them on the other side. Max took charge and slowly made the turn, searching for the slightest movement to shoot.

Bullets finally came their way as Max fired at the person who was shooting in the blind.

‘Man down. Passageway clear,’ Max said as they still slowly made their move towards the first floor. The pattern on the first floor was similar to the one on the ground floor – an alleyway and four rooms. All four of them took one each and found and neutralised two more men on the first floor before making their way to the top floor. They were yet to find ‘the Butcher’ or the sarin.

‘Twenty-five minutes. We have twenty more minutes to close this out,’ Bob mentioned after looking at his timer.

As they reached the top floor, Bob took the room on the left as the alleyway was calm.

As soon as Bob entered the first room, a man ran out of the second room, already shooting.

Max shot and missed as the terrorist’s bullet hit Max’s bulletproof vest.

Paige came in from behind to shoot the terrorist down as Max’s heartbeat elevated. He could feel the adrenaline rushing through his body.

‘Careful, rookie,’ Paige said in a condescending tone.

Max nodded and went towards the third room of the floor. There was a lot of movement on this floor, and yet Max couldn’t catch anyone on his viewfinder. The third room was dark up until the moment bullets came flying in towards him. He ran for cover and found another entry to the room from the other side. He slowly moved in and fired at the source but couldn’t see anyone through his viewfinder.

He slowly moved in to sweep the room as another bullet nicked his arm.

The shooter was behind the door Max was entering from and, as soon as he entered, tried to take control of his rifle.

Max looked at the man’s face. It was the butcher, his six-feet-four-inch frame towering above Max.

The Butcher’s raw strength overpowered Max as the rest of the team shouted over at the comms.

‘What the fuck is happening, rookie?’ Bob asked on the comms.

Max couldn’t respond while he was in the fight to gain control of his rifle.

The Butcher headbutted him to the ground and had his M4A1 in his control.

Max’s heart was beating out of his chest as he tried to take cover, hoping to take advantage of the dark.

The Butcher wasn’t waiting around and fired. The bullet pierced through Max’s bulletproof vest before the Butcher finished Max off with a headshot.

The world around Max went dark.

‘Exit game,’ Max said.

As soon as he did, the darkness was gone, and Max was back in his bedroom.

‘Fuck you, Butcher! Fuck you! I am going to get you the next time!’ Max shouted and threw his Captivate Tech’s (CT) pebble on the ground.

‘Enough of this already! You have been wired in for fourteen hours! Go to sleep! It’s a school day tomorrow!’ Max’s mom shouted from the other room as she heard Max.

‘Fuck you, Butcher.’ Max continued without paying heed to what his mom just asked him to do.

Exit%20Game%20Cover%20Image.jpg

CHAPTER 1

SHARON

‘How are you feeling today, agent?’ Sharon heard a voice, but she couldn’t recognise who it was.

Without even opening her eyes, she straight away raised her left hand to get hold of her gun that she used to keep on the table next to her bed. Given the agility she had, she knew she would be pointing the gun at the source of the voice in less than two seconds.

She moved her left arm but couldn’t reach what she was aiming for because there wasn’t any table next to her bed nor was there any gun. If there had been a gun, she still wouldn’t have reached it because the important thing that was missing was her arm.

‘Calm now, agent. We have been through this routine a hundred times already,’ the voice said again.

Sharon, in a state of shock, opened her eyes, and it took her a while to acclimatise to the light in the room. She could now see the silhouette of the person who was talking to her. She immediately looked to her left where her arm should have been but found nothing beyond her left shoulder.

‘What have you done to me!’ Sharon shouted as hard as she could.

‘Don’t you remember anything, agent? Don’t you remember how this happened?’ The silhouette had given way to a person in a lab suit who was entirely calm given the circumstances.

She was talking to a doctor. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she could clearly see the doctor’s fair skin, blonde hair tied in a bun, and the eyes staring at her. The doctor was filling the details on a terminal as if she had a prepared checklist of a set of questions she wanted to ask. Sharon was sure that she had never seen or met the doctor before in her life.

She understood that she was in a hospital but had no memory of how she got there or remember what happened to her arm.

‘Where am I?’ she asked, still unsure of everything – the surroundings, the people, herself.

‘The more important question is, who are you? Do you remember who you are?’ the doctor asked her.

‘Of course I remember who I am. I am …,’ she said and stopped. She tried to remember. She couldn’t believe that nothing came back to her when asked who she really was. How could she not remember the most fundamental thing about herself?

‘What is the last thing that you can remember, agent?’ the doctor asked her, hoping against hope that she was on the path to improvement.

‘I … I … I don’t know. I can’t remember anything,’ Sharon replied, tears dripping down her face.

‘Maybe this will jog your memory,’ the doctor said and hologrammed a set of pictures right in front of Sharon’s face.

She saw a woman in her early thirties, with beautiful blue eyes and auburn hair, running on a beach with a kid, a girl, no older than 5, playing catch and smiling away.

Apart from that little girl, the hologram also showed a lean, muscular man with blonde hair who caught the child followed by the three of them hugging and laughing. It was a frame of a memory of a very happy family.

While all these holographic images kept running in front of her eyes, she tried to remember if she had seen or met any of them before.

‘Do you remember now, agent?’ the doctor asked again.

‘Who are these people? Do I … do I know them?’ Sharon stuttered. She still wasn’t able to bring any visual memory of any of the people she saw. Everything was a blur.

The doctor was standing around eight feet away from where Sharon was. Sharon was trying to catch her name through the name pin attached to her lab coat while the doctor shook her head, knowing fully well that they were regressing instead of progressing with Sharon’s memory.

‘Do you know who you are, Sharon?’ Dr Lebowitz asked. Sharon could finally read the name on the lab coat.

‘I …,’ Sharon started to speak, but nothing came out of her mouth. She just couldn’t remember. She didn’t even remember that her name was Sharon.

The last time she was asked to identify these people, she remembered her daughter. This time she wasn’t even able to identify herself.

Dr Lebowitz logged it in her report log as had been her routine for the past eight months. It was all a cycle, and every time Sharon woke up, Dr Lebowitz wasn’t sure how Sharon would react.

Sometimes she would wake up remembering the entire incident of how she reached that hospital, and on other days, like today, she would be absolutely unaware about where she was, how she lost her arm, or who she was.

‘Let’s do this again tomorrow,’ Dr Lebowitz said, looking at the nurse standing next to Sharon’s bed and leaving the room.

Tears continued to roll down her face as she asked the nurse for a mirror.

The nurse went over the side table and brought it to Sharon.

Sharon exhaled and inhaled deeply before turning to the mirror, trying to recognise the face staring back at her.

It was the same auburn-haired, blue-eyed woman from the video on the holo-terminal. She couldn’t recognise herself. Was that her child? Her husband? Where were they? What happened to them?

Sharon started howling as hundreds of questions flooded her. Her shout was cut short by a needle injected by the nurse that instantly put her to sleep.

Exit%20Game%20Cover%20Image.jpg

CHAPTER 2

AHMED

A t five feet ten inches, wearing a loose plain T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of sneakers, Ahmed was standing at the entrance of his familiar office, a place he no longer was a regular at.

A thin beard and well-groomed salt pepper hair did give away his age. He was a 49-year-old professor of technology.

As soon as he entered, he could see the breaking news flash on the terminal installed at the reception. He had a meeting in another ten minutes, but the news stopped him in his tracks.

‘In another shocking development, yet another school has been attacked by a teenager who was also a student at the school. While the story is still developing, initial reports suggest that the child entered the recess hall and open fired,’ the reporter said, showing visuals of the school building.

‘It was only the third day of the capsule sessions that students came into the school for.’ The reporter continued, informing the audience of the capsule sessions that the students attended, the only time they were required to be in the school building for social bonding and civic training in an otherwise coursework done using holograms.

‘The news from one of the teachers who was present in the recess hall at the time confirms that the boy was delusional and kept talking about getting to the Butcher. When one of his classmates tried to reason with him, he opened fire. The hunt is on to understand who he was searching for. Early reports suggest that he was acting as though he didn’t even have a gun in the cafeteria of his school. Instead, his demeanour was one that was calm, acting like someone on a mission,’ the news reporter said as the developing details were being thrown at her.

Ahmed’s eyes widened behind his circular glasses as soon as he heard the word ‘delusional’.

‘Our research team is also looking into any connection between this shooting and the two that occurred in two separate incidents, one in a college and another in a school on the other side of the town. In both the cases, the perpetrator was found to have been using Captivate Tech’s immersive pebble tech for long hours, causing them to become delusional, unable to understand the difference between the reality and the game from Captivate Tech. While it will be a leap to connect this case to the ones confirmed before, the theory does appear consistent. We will continue to bring you the latest on this as we hear more.’ The terminal went silent as an advertisement for Captivate Tech came on.

‘Watch the full ad to get extra ruby coins,’ the ad said after showing a small promo. Ahmed declined and continued to his office.

It wasn’t often that he came into his office since most of his work was done through holo-meetings with other professors. His classes too on most days took place through holo-tech. It was ironic really since he used to take a class, ‘consumer tech and the future of humanity’, where he spoke of the moral and mortal dangers of the overreliance on technology for all purposes.

While the technological advances had made things simpler, processes leaner, democratised learning, and available for everyone who wanted to study no matter the subject or their geographic location, the question really was where to draw the line.

Ahmed’s classes were not meant to be taught at one university but were available for anyone who wanted to study the subject. He had students from sixty-three countries attending his holo-classes, and for the professor, it did give a feeling of teaching in an actual classroom, while for a student, it felt like a one-on-one session. This meant that the students understood better, the teacher-student relationship was still intact, and for the professor, it somehow still felt like a classroom.

It was Ahmed’s knowledge on the subject that the news of the shooting didn’t surprise him at all. He knew it all too well that this was bound to happen. What really worried him was that it was just the beginning!

He was considered one of the thought leaders and was seldom consulted by the senate and ministers of information technology and consumer technology. He had often warned them of the ill effects of all the tech companies and the products they were working on.

Currently, he was working on a report to rank the most dangerous tech companies in the world and giving a score to their ‘visionary’ founders so that the senate could keep an eye out for the tech they were working on.

Captivate Tech, the company that developed the immersive tech game that had already led to three known shootings in the past one year, was the number 1 on his list.

The real worry was that the founder of the company was elusive and anonymous. Nobody knew if it was a single person or a group of people, but whosoever it was or they were went by the name ‘Genie’.

While nobody knew who was at the helm, for an immersive reality company, ironically, it was one of the few companies left that had a dedicated office building. It wasn’t just reality altering technology that the company worked on. It was also the market leader in the holo-tech space and had a footprint in all the countries globally.

Captivate Tech’s immersive technology development process was all too secretive. Nobody knew the entire code that went into building the device. The hardware device, pebble, had been reverse engineered by a number of people, but nobody knew how the real world was situated so immaculately in the games. The ever-expanding, replicating, and healing codebase was built on a programming language nobody outside Captivate Tech understood. It meant nobody in the world could break the code. The game had all the cities around the globe simulated to the last detail. Even a scratch on the wall in the dimly lit alley in the remote part of the city was mapped.

No matter how much Ahmed had grown to hate CT’s tech, he knew that it was a work of genius. As geniuses often are, some of