“Am-bots still on us!” he yells as we take the staircase. Down below there’s the sound of boots and a rattle of gunfire. We crash into the second-floor hallway, forty feet from the gamer cell and closing. Behind us, the stairwell door smashes open. I position myself solidly in front of the apartment at the end of the hall and kick it open to reveal the pale light of a flat-screen. Two hackers are on the couch controlling the Am-bots. I raise my machine gun and let off a burst of bullets that catches them as they turn. The red dots of our targets disappear from our map.

Congratulations! You’ve just eliminated two leaders of the insurgency.

“Search the bodies,” Brogan orders as he secures the door.

The room is hard to navigate in the darkness. There’s only the blue light of the television illuminating the bodies. On the screen, the Am-bots they were controlling stand motionless, and for a moment the double vision of seeing the game within the game on my own screen is disorienting. I keep expecting my controller to move the small figures on the apartment’s flat-screen, so I focus on the ground instead, my GoPro projecting the mess of the room. There are food containers on the floor, empty plastic bottles, and dirty clothes. There’s a blast of gunfire outside.

“Hurry up!” Brogan yells.

I round the couch, the light of the screen flickering against the gamers’ bodies. It’s when I see their faces that my weapon slumps toward the ground.

The boys on the couch are no older than Eli. Between them is an empty tube of Pringles and an open carton of Ikram biscuits. One of the boys had been holding a plastic bottle of Fanta, which is now in his lap, the orange soda spilling onto him and the floor in a fizzing, widening circle.

“They’re kids,” I say.

“They’re not kids, they’re insurgents. Come on, we got Am-bots to deal with! Stay with me now, don’t log off!”

I log off.

The house is quiet. My half-finished beer is on the coffee table, my abandoned controller in my lap, the system blinking blue. Beside me is an opened bag of corn chips, which I stare and stare at. I’m not sure how long I sit there, frozen. All I know is that when I finally rise, I cross the room to the console, hold down the power button, and wait for the blue light to die.