In 1993, Bruce Sterling traveled to the Army’s National Training Center in the Mojave Desert to write the cover article for the first-ever issue of Wired Magazine. The subject was the military’s use of new virtual reality technology to train US soldiers — and their commanders, all the way up the chain — to fight entire, integrated conventional wars without firing actual bullets. “Seamless simulation,” as the military planners called it, was “not a blue-sky notion,” Sterling wrote. “It's clearly within reach.” His prognostications came to fruition as the U.S. military turned to more realistic, comprehensive simulators to perfect increasingly complex net-centric warfare.