I jolted awake. Someone was yelling at us. I blinked the sleep back from my eyes and straightened up. The flight lieutenant who had overseen the airmen tending to our needs this whole trip was back, shouting over the roar of the engines.
"We'll be arriving at Nellis in approximately 10 minutes. You’re in luck. We are landing from the west so if you're interested in getting a look at the Greater Mojave spaceport, find a window and take a look.”
A couple of my fellow passengers unstrapped at once, leaping up, stretching, complaining about cramps. I would very much have liked to see the spaceport. Even a shut-in like me had heard about the transformation of a huge swath of the American desert into the largest spaceport on Earth, with transport up into orbit now costing less than a transatlantic flight. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of spacecraft leaving every day. The vast open stretches made a good place to launch from.
My seatmate, Amber, got up. She looked at me and gave a semi-apologetic shrug. I shook my head. "Take a pic and show me," I said. The windows were tiny and widely spaced down the cargo hold. The nearest ones had a crowd around them already.
She pulled out her phone and gave me a thumbs up. I leaned back and closed my eyes, trying not to resent it. It was hard.
I'd worked with disability educators and advocates, some of whom had been in wheelchairs or worse. One of my pen pals, back when I first hurt my back, was a full-on quadriplegic. He had to communicate using nothing but his mouth to move a cursor and peck out messages letter by letter, or more lately, voice-to-text technology.
They'd told me to accept that I was going to be angry sometimes about my injury. That was fine, but that there was nothing I could do about it, and I was going to have to find a way to accept it sooner or later. Only it's hard when you're a 13-year-old kid who's just been told he'll never kick a football again, to put yourself in that kind of mindset.
The world's not built for people in wheelchairs. My favorite tea shop, the one Mum and I always went to every Thursday afternoon after school, had a door too narrow to get my chair through, and a nasty high stone step that was impossible to navigate with my walker. My school had only had a single bathroom stall wide enough for me to use, and half the time the other boys had clogged the toilet on purpose. I'd missed out on every school trip and field day for my year nine.
I think Mum understood, and that was why she hadn't put up too much of a fuss when I said I was done with school and started streaming. At least on the internet, I was as fast and as capable as anyone else.
But now, now I had a chance to take back what I'd lost. To get my legs back, to have my life back. But at what cost? I knew what they said: go to a reality engine and you didn't come back. Whatever magic it worked to rebuild bodies, you were dependent on. There were implications there I didn't like. But on the other hand, my legs back. That was worth a lot. Maybe even never seeing Mum again.
I banished that thought as we tilted sharply. The airmen returned and urged everyone back to their seats. Five minutes later, we were on the ground. The ramp opened with a long, loud whine of engines. Hot, dry air rushed into the plane to meet us.
Everyone else trooped off, and then an airman came and unstrapped my chair.I started to roll it toward the rear ramp but quickly got stuck in a floor slot.
The airman gave me what was probably a sympathetic smile.
"Long flight like that stiffens you up like nobody's business," he said. "I'll help you."
He grabbed the handles and freed my chair easily. I was wheeled off the RAF C-17 by the big black airman in RAF blues, holding up my hand to shield my eyes from the sun. I’d never seen sun so bright and piercing. There wasn't a cloud in the sky overhead. A bird circled. I assumed it must be a vulture, here to feast on the bodies of the unsuspecting Brits who'd come to such a godforsaken hellhole.
My mouth was parched at once. As we left the aircraft, we were greeted by American airmen. One of them, a cute woman, with three stripes on her uniform sleeve, handed me a plastic bottle of water. She was handing them out to everyone. The water was icy cold. I twisted the cap and guzzled half of it down.
"That's the spirit," she encouraged me. Her accent was a Texas drawl I'd never heard anywhere outside a Hollywood movie. "If you're out in this sun for long, you need plenty of water. And a hat and sunscreen," she added, her eyes going to my pale arms.
I felt like a complete muppet as I muttered my thanks. The airman wheeled me over to a line of waiting identical black SUVs, more than enough for the couple dozen gamers on my plane.
The last vehicle in line was a big Ford Transit van. They wheeled me over to it. To my surprise, it had a wheelchair lift. They opened the doors and pulled me right up, wheeled me on, cinched down my wheelchair.
There were three banks of seats, mostly full. Heads turned to look at me. A bunch of impassive young Asian guys stared. I raised a hand and smiled.
"How's it going?" I said.
They looked at each other, shook their heads. One of them said something. I didn't know what language it was. Not Chinese, I was pretty sure.
A minute later, a pair of Caucasian men climbed into the van, taking the last two seats. One sat right in front of me. Apparently the Asian fellows knew them because they started talking animatedly. The Caucasians answered back. The one in front of me turned and grinned. He was a tall man, probably in his forties, with dark hair and a pointed nose.
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
"I hope it's not inconvenient to have you on this van with us," he said cheerfully. "They wanted to transport the whole Starcraft team as a group so that Nick and I could ride with them and translate. This is the only accessible van, I guess." He sounded American to me.
I let out a sigh of relief. "Sure, I was just worried I was going to be on a van full of people who didn't speak English and no idea what's going on here. You gamers?"
The guy in front of me shook his head. "Nick and I are professional casters. Mostly for Starcraft and Starcraft 2. We've both spent time in South Korea and speak the language a bit."
"Oh, so they're South Korean. That's good to know."
The doors behind me opened and another wheelchair user was loaded in. She was a woman in her thirties. Small, maybe even shrunken in on herself if I was being overly descriptive. She introduced herself as "Aurelie" in heavily French-accented English. I assumed she was from France until she explained she was Quebecois. The Canadians had just landed a transport of their own, it seemed. The eSports guy in front of me said he’d been on it – so he wasn’t a Yank after all, but a good Commonwealth subject.
With our van full, the convoy set off. I counted at least 15 big black SUVs in front of us.
"Americans sure know how to run the logistics," I commented as we made our way through the Air Force Base.
The Koreans were pointing out the window and saying something.
"What are they on about?" I asked the eSports caster in front of me.
He shook his head and grinned. "They're hoping to catch a glimpse of the alien spacecraft."
"Aren't those all out at the spaceport?”
He shook his head. "They mean from Area 51. That's attached to the Nellis range, you know."
"Wait, there really is an Area 51?" I said. "I thought that was like Roswell, just made up internet stuff."
"There's an Area 51, there's an Area 52, and an Area 50 as well. It's just the designation for different swaths of the test ranges. But yeah, that's here. Way to the north though."
I peered in front of us.
What had started out as a drive down a boring city street, just a bit more brown than back home, was turning into something much brighter.
I've been to London plenty of times. Mostly when I was younger, but once or two times since my accident. We went to Seville on vacation, and to Glasgow once. I know what a city is.
Vegas is not a city. Vegas is madness. A delusion. Buildings shot out of the desert. Ridiculously tall, 10, even 20 stories, all lit in garish neon colors. There was a huge pyramid, and an enormous globe. An Eiffel Tower.
I stared. The South Koreans pointed and yelled excitedly as we passed hotels with famous names: Mirage, Cosmopolitan, Caesar's Palace, Venetian. We drove past the fountains of water at the Bellagio, cascading and falling in defiance of the desert around them, before reaching our destination, the Galaxy.
It was a two-tower hotel, with one tower rising up 20 stories, and the other at least 30. It was built of some jet-black material adorned with shining stars all over it. The windows were tinted and reflected the lights of Vegas back down to us.
We pulled up in front. There was an enormous star painted on the concrete of the entry area, and half a dozen hypercars parked in front of the doors. A McLaren, a Lamborghini, an Aston Martin, two different Ferraris, and a car I couldn't even identify, but guessed had to be worth at least half a million pounds.
We waited in the line as each SUV unloaded its cargo of gamers, who stood gawking in front of the doors until shepherded in by our escorts. At last it was our turn. The Starcraft players and their translators/casters got out the front as Aurelie and I waited for someone to finally come and get us out the back. Once on the pavement, I took control of my chair and wheeled myself in through the vast doors.
They had big automatic doors, more than wide enough for me and Aurelie to go in side by side. We wheeled into the casino, right into the midst of the babbling crowd of gamers. I stared around in awe. Everything was bright colors, gold, red, purples and blues, banks of flashing slot machines stood everywhere beeping and rattling and letting out little electronic songs.
I watched a fat middle-aged American woman play. She leaned in, intent on nothing but the spinning dials in front of her. They came up star, star, circle. She didn't even look disappointed, just put in another quarter and pulled the lever again for the next try.
Some of the gamblers were smoking. Others had drinks in their hands. One woman had a little poodle in a service dog vest curled up at her feet. I started to wonder if there were exploits for gaming machines like these and if so, how I could test it out without getting in trouble. On the plus side, if some Vegas mob goons did decide to break my legs, at least I mostly wouldn't feel it.
"All right, everyone here?" a man near the front of the crowd shouted. "We'll take you to the tournament grounds now. You’re already checked in and we’ll hand out room assignments later. Don't worry, your luggage has already been taken care of."
"Yes, we can stop by the bathrooms first," he said in answer to a question from the front that I hadn't heard. That was a relief.
Even more of a relief, the bathroom was handicap accessible. Everything here was big and shiny and smelled like perfume. I wheeled back into the hall and waited as the rest of us gathered. The carpet was red and gold with a swirling design. There were no windows anywhere, just rows and rows of slot machines. I started trying to make a map and spot the service entrances and hidden that would make a place like this work.
We navigated the confusing maze of the casino, passing through gaming rooms and past roulette wheels, down corridors that looked like they ought to lead to a service elevator, only to find ourselves in another opulent gaming section.
I heard one of the guys near me mutter, "Hope they give us guides to this place. I'm never going to be able to find my way back to the front desk." I rolled my eyes at that. Keeping track of where you were and building up a mental map was the essence of gaming for me. I'd found multiple wall hacks when I realized that a group of designers had taken an easy way out and modeled maps from different acts of the game right next to each other. A quick ghost step or flesh to mist spell would often let me slip from a level one kobold dungeon right to the act four boss antechamber. After that, of course, I'd have to find a way to defeat the boss, seriously underleveled. But that was the fun of speedruns and exploiting games: finding the combination of spells and abilities that no designer had ever expected anyone to use and then enjoying the results.
I had already spotted the path we were taking through the casino was a zig-zag pattern. I was certain we could’ve gotten where we were going at least three other, faster, ways.
The casino gave way to a conference center, the broad hallway echoed with our voices. Most of my fellow gamers seemed pretty excited about this. We strode past closed doors, each with electronic screens outside. All of the screens displayed "Joint Task Force Ganymede welcomes the All Earth Invitational E-Sports Tournament" There was a logo under it showing Jupiter, mostly eclipsed by a large moon. The words "Auctoritas non veritas facit mundos" under it wrapped around on a banner. We tried to translate, but my school had been heavy on the "responsible global citizenship," light on the Latin, so other than the obvious use of “mundos or “world,” I was lost.
“Ready to get started?” our escort called. “Right through here!”