The world is a four-inch screen of grainy, low-latency analog video. Mario sits perfectly still on a wobbly stool, his body a statue, only his thumbs moving in tiny, fluid arcs over the controller sticks. The air in the concrete dugout is thick with the smells of damp earth, ozone from the humming electronics, and Kong’s stale sweat. A web of black cables spills across the floor and table, connecting batteries, receivers, and monitors in a chaotic but functional ecosystem.
“Callsign ‘Plumber’, this is ‘Royal’. Be advised, objective is a comms relay in grid square four-niner,” Peach’s voice, the only clean thing in the room, materializes in his headset. “High command is putting a bounty on this one. Confirmation nets a point bonus.”
A low grunt comes from the corner, where Kong’s massive frame eclipses the light from a bare bulb. He’s plugging a long, yellow battery into a drone chassis, his thick fingers surprisingly delicate. He squints at a small voltage meter. “Another one of these cheap bananas,” he rumbles, not looking up. “Full charge my ass. You’ll be lucky to get home on this, Mario.” Kong finishes his work, attaching the squat, red-capped ordnance. He jacks a cryptographic key into a port; a satisfying chime from a nearby tablet confirms the previous mission’s bounty has been deposited. Business as usual.
“Launching,” Mario says, his own voice sounding distant. On his screen, the world tilts and rushes forward. He pushes the drone low, a hornet skimming over fields of dead, gray sunflowers. The video feed jitters, beset by the jello effect of motor vibrations and Russian jammers. He ignores it. He is pure input and output. A biological processor for the machine.
The trench line appears as a dark gash in the terrain, a glitch in the landscape’s texture.
“Visual on the nest,” he reports. He sees movement below, tiny figures rendered in poor resolution. Sprites. He has eliminated thousands of them.
He identifies the target: a crude bunker dug into the trench wall, a thicket of antennas sprouting from its roof. The comms relay. The Bonus. He pushes the right stick forward, and the drone screams toward the earth. The whine of the motors in his ears pitches higher. The ground rushes up, resolving from a blurry texture map into individual clods of dirt and splintered wood.
And then the camera’s cheap sensor adjusts. For a fraction of a second, the signal clarifies with perfect, terrible fidelity. He sees a man, no older than himself, leaning against the bunker wall. He is not looking at the sky. He is looking at a small, dog-eared photograph, his thumb stroking its surface. The man’s face is slack with exhaustion, his expression soft and unguarded. In that frozen moment, he is not a sprite. He is a man looking at a picture.
Mario’s thumb, acting on muscle memory honed over a thousand hours, depresses the release button.
The word PAYLOAD AWAY flashes in green across the top of his feed. He yanks the stick back, the drone clawing for altitude as he turns for home, refusing his brain’s demand to look back. The drone is the priority. The hardware. He flies the return leg with numb precision, navigating by the telemetry data, not the landscape.
The drone touches down on the pockmarked landing pad outside. Kong lumbers out to retrieve it. Mario pulls the goggles from his face, blinking in the dim light of the dugout. The screens cast a pale, flickering light on his face.
Peach swivels in her chair, a data tablet in her hand. “Confirmed,” she says, her voice even. “Relay is down. Bonus acquired. Top of the leaderboard again, Mario.”
An animation of a gold coin spinning plays on the tablet screen, its cheerful jingle sounding obscenely loud in the sudden silence. Mario looks at the controller in his hands, at the smooth plastic worn down by his thumbs. He sets it down on the table, very carefully, as if it were made of glass. He does not say a word. He just stares at his empty hands.
Curious how much is AI? Read the prompt here.