Witness Protection Program

Life’s a rigged game sometimes. I’ve always known that, but it still stings when you get burned just for trying to even the odds. My name’s Riley Voss—23, wiry, and wired a little off-kilter, according to my mom. All I wanted was a decent ping for Starstrike, my online shooter obsession. I’d shelled out for the latest satellite internet—hyped as “revolutionary”—but it was a laggy joke. On a good day, I clocked 95 milliseconds while kids with fiber flaunted pings of five. I’d modded my setup with a split-tongue controller, cutting my reaction time to half a pro’s, but it didn’t matter. The speed of light screwed me every match, lag spiking me into defeat. I was done losing.


My brain’s always been a tangle of weird connections—part gift, part curse. Frustration must’ve flipped a switch, because one night, raging at another headshot I couldn’t dodge, an idea hit me: beat the light barrier. Crazy, sure, but I’d read enough sci-fi and skimmed enough physics forums to guess at a workaround. Quantum entanglement—spooky action at a distance—could carry a signal faster than photons ever would. If I could split an entangled stream, buffer it just right, I might shave my ping to nothing.


I wasn’t some labcoat genius. I’d barely scraped through community college, but I had a knack for hacking problems apart. The University of Maryland’s applied physics department was a 30-minute bus ride from my Rockville apartment, so I started lurking there after hours. The postgrads—bleary-eyed nerds nursing coffee and code—humored me at first, then got hooked when I sketched my plan on a whiteboard. We hashed it out over weeks: a quantumly entangled carrier signal, split at the source. Half zipped instantly to the game server; the other crawled through my satellite pipe. I’d buffer it at 153 milliseconds—twice addressable—letting me tweak the data mid-flight. Beyond that, the signal frayed, coherence collapsing, but within it? Instantaneous. Faster-than-light gaming, baby.


It worked—mostly. Uploads burned 75% of my bandwidth on redundancy and error correction, but the 25% that punched through was pure gold. I was fragging kids in Seoul from Maryland with a ping they couldn’t touch. Downloads were trickier—I was still puzzling out reserved bits for the return trip—when my world exploded.


March 14, 2025, 11:47 p.m. I was hunched over my rig in my basement apartment, a tangle of wires and scavenged quantum gear humming beside me. The window shattered—glass spraying like shrapnel—and a flashbang turned everything white. My ears rang, a high-pitched whine drowning thought. Before I could blink, three hulks in black SWAT gear—no patches, no names—yanked me from my chair, zip-tying my wrists. I hit the floor hard, tasting blood, as they hauled me out. “Don’t talk,” one growled, “unless you want to lose the option.” I clamped my mouth shut, heart hammering.


They shoved me into a blacked-out van, tinted windows sealing me in. Through a slit, I watched a dozen more swarm my place, cataloging every gadget—my PC, the quantum rig, even my ancient GameCube—before boxing it into moving vans. Twenty minutes of ruthless efficiency, and my life was a barcode archive. Then a new figure approached, slim and sharp in a gray suit, glasses glinting under the streetlight. He looked like Dr. Jackson from Stargate SG-1—if Jackson had swapped archaeology for menace. He waved the goons out, leaving us alone in the van’s dim belly.


“You’ve built the strangest machine we’ve ever seen,” he said, voice smooth with a flicker of awe, face blank as slate. “Not a signal processing savant—efficiency’s a mess, downlink’s half-baked—but it’s a leap. Every metric that matters, you’ve cracked. Real-time comms to ships light-hours away? That’s you.”


I stared, mute. He didn’t wait for me to catch up.


“We’ve been watching for weeks. Civilian breakthroughs like this don’t stay civilian. You’re not just gaming—you’re rewriting interplanetary ops.” His lips twitched, admiration breaking through. “We’re offering you a spot in the Witness Protection Program. Capital W, capital P—your out-of-the-box brain qualifies.”


I swallowed, throat dry. “If I say no, do I rot in a hole somewhere?”


He tilted his head, noncommittal. “We’d see what happens. But you don’t want that.”


My mind raced. “What, like some Eureka-style secret town if I sign up?”


“Something like that,” he said, a grin tugging at his mouth, barely contained.


I matched it, adrenaline spiking. “Fine. Send me to your dumb town.”


He paused, studying me for twenty seconds, like he wanted to ask why “dumb” but thought better of it. “We should’ve nabbed you out of high school,” he said finally. “Big imagination—needs a leash.”


I laughed, a wild guess clicking into place. Ten hours later, I was in Nevada, strapped into an elevator car plunging miles beneath the desert. The Deep Underground Military Base—DUMB, ha—unfolded below, a sci-fi hive carved from rock. The drop was fast, gravity loosening its grip, my stomach lurching as I nearly floated. “This is gonna be awesome,” I muttered, grinning like a kid.


Epilogue


They called it Site Theta—miles of tunnels, labs, and secrets under Nevada’s crust. My escort—Dr. Elias Kane, he’d introduced himself—set me up in a spartan bunk with a terminal tied to a classified net. My quantum rig arrived the next day, dissected and rebuilt by techs who muttered about “genius kludges.” They didn’t care about Starstrike. Their eyes were on Mars, Titan, the Kuiper Belt—places my signal could reach in real time.


I got a crash course in their world: quantum comms, AI drones, ships that’d been silent for hours until I came along. Kane was my handler, dry and brilliant, pushing me to refine the downlink. “You’re a gamer, not a physicist,” he’d say, “but you’ve got instincts.” I liked the challenge—lag-free gaming swapped for lag-free space. My old life was gone—Riley Voss, erased—but I didn’t miss it. Not yet.


Weeks in, I overheard whispers: my breakthrough had tripped alarms beyond Site Theta. Some agency—NSA? DARPA?—wanted it buried; others wanted it weaponized. Kane shrugged when I asked. “You’re here. That’s what counts.” I wondered how long I’d stay “here” before they decided I was too loose a cannon.


For now, I tinkered, grinned, and dreamed of fragging Martians. Life was unfair, sure—but down in the dark, I was winning.