Cartel coffers drained, we alt-escaped our planes back home on autopilot.
Griefer didn't laugh, he cackled. He hopped up and down in his rig on a Mountain Dew high. He was all, "Ha ha, eat me, bitches! Those guys were so gay!"
"Nice shooting, Gee," I said.
"You'll get there, slick." He bounced out of his chair, headed for the door. "Those guys were noobs. God," he said like he'd bit into something moldy, "I hate noobs." His thumbs were texting. He disappeared around the corner, headed for the game room. A minute later, I got this text: "u shoot lk my moms lol wtf xx"
His stats kept going up. He started kill-stealing like crazy. He flew a couple of damaged planes into enemy UAVs. His ego swelled. He bought a UAV Corp cap and wore it sideways. He learned how to transmit to the enemy via SMS. "Doods ur teh sxxr," he wrote. "Wtf I rulez! and pvvnd lk ur mom n00b."
The brass let it go. "Psychological warfare," one of them told me.
"I'm getting psychological splash damage over here," I said.
"A little collateral damage is acceptable if it gets them busting their rigs. Don't take it so seriously."
The age-old griefer's condolence: Don't take it so seriously. Yes, sir. Fuck you, sir.
Griefer started a trend. Inside three months, enemy pilots were sending SMS-squawks at us. "Heh yank cowboi," they wrote. "Ur l4m3." Like their fashion, third-world leet-speak was stuck in a previous decade.
Thing is, the UAV Corp banned open-air communications specifically so enemy pilots couldn't hear us cussing and fuming over our losses. When you can't hear somebody get pwned, the charm of gloating is cut in half. But until Griefer got shot down over the Urals his stats were so sweet they let his texting slide. They saw the effect it had on enemy pilots, especially after E!'s spotlight on Griefer let word out he was so young.
Two missions before the Urals, I should've known something was up. I'd seen him wave off blown missions, but this was different.
It was the two of us against old-school manned fighters who'd been shooting down remote-piloted cargo-lift airships in Eastern Europe. They were remnants of the last decade's terrorist armies, their skills and motives stale. Griefer and I each took one down, and, man, did he love that. "It's so cool to see these old planes blow up. What fucking douchebags even use those things anymore?" He slurped Army-green Mountain Dew Pro Fuel from a can.
Our high-altitude cameras showed the dead jets blooming, overexposed orange-and-black blobs. No ejections. The pilots must've tumbled like shrapnel, hundreds of miles an hour. This wasn't my first kill, but it was Griefer's. He didn't seem to notice.
