Charlie Platoon's survivors called in air-support as they struggled to reach the relative safety of Baseline Amber. In answer, two automatic Apache attack helicopters emerged from the blue nothingness of SIMNET's cyberspace sky. They fired air-to-surface missiles and swiftly roasted a pair of enemy tanks; but the other T-72 tanks potted both the choppers on the wing. The Apaches fell in crumpled digital heaps of flaming polygons.
As the engagement proceeded, dead men began to show up in the CATTC video classroom. Inside the simulators, their vision blocks had gone suddenly blank with the onset of virtual death. Here in CATTC's virtual Valhalla, however, a large Electrohome video display unit showed a comprehensive overhead map of the entire battlefield. Group by group, the dead tank crews filed into the classroom and gazed upon the battlefield from a heavenly perspective.
Slouching in their seats and perching their forage caps on their knees, they began to talk. They weren't talking about pixels, polygons, baud-rates, Ethernet lines, or network architecture. If they'd felt any gosh-wow respect for these high-tech aspects of their experience, those perceptions had clearly vanished early on. They were talking exclusively about fields of fire, and fall-back positions, and radio traffic and indirect artillery strikes. They weren't discussing "virtual reality" or anything akin to it. These soldiers were talking war.
"Get them, sir," a deceased tanker muttered vengefully as he watched Alpha 24's heroic stand in the fake Mojave Hills. Another tanker, from the Alpha scout unit, griped bitterly about his death by friendly fire: "fratricide." Dying at the hands of his own platoon had been especially cruel. It was clear that the real-life lesson of unit coordination had sunk in well - at least for this poor