The Starry Rift

by Jonathan Strahan

  He plays with his friends; I play alone. But we have our best times when we’re together. Unlike most people who are good at handling code (I taught him that), we’re not geeks. We don’t think of it as taking a machine apart. The code is like our magic powers. Or our survival lore in the wilderness. Do you know how to make a fire without matches? I do. And it’s logic. It’s not a dumb secret word left lying around for me to find. It’ll work with just about any game engine.

  Our parents didn’t ground us after the rescue helicopter incident. They just reproached us and were sad and played all the tricks parents play to make you feel guilty and get you back on the leash. But everyone seemed to take our word that we’d lost track of time, and for whatever reason the pages telling us we were overdue had not reached us. This told us something interesting. Our trip off the map had not been logged on the working record of the resort. The management and our parents were prepared to give us the benefit of the doubt over those missed pages, but if they’d known we’d disappeared off the face of the resort world-map, for two extra hours, that would have been a big deal.

  We did a lot of thinking about those mystery missing hours. My brother came up with the idea that it was a time glitch, and when we’d been in that unmapped sector we’d been slowed down without realizing it—

  He sat on the end of my bed, scrunching up his face. “Or speeded up,” he added. “Whichever works.”

  I didn’t tease him. Speeded up/slowed down is like “What time is it in Tokyo?”; it’s hard to keep it straight in your head. “Except that we were in real time, bro. We weren’t cruising around the Caribbean, were we? We were at the resort.”

  It’s a basic venue, no frills. You go there and it’s exactly like a day by the sea, with gentle “wilderness” areas like our reedbeds. You stay for exactly the time it feels like, which is the starter level, safest way to play total immersion games. The resort’s meant for families with little kids. We just like it.

  “Maybe we really did lose track of time,” said Dev.

  But I knew we hadn’t. Something had happened when we went through that flaw, something sly and twisted. “No. There’s something screwy going on.”

  These cheats who’d been annoying us were not normal cheats. Nothing like the legendary girl (supposed to be a girl, but who knows) called Kill Bill, who had wasted thousands of grunts in Amerika Kombat, and who never seemed to tire of her guaranteed headshots: when one server threw her out, she’d log on to another.

  We’d seen our characters at combat venues, and they were cheating-good at racking up. But they weren’t obsessed with high scores, of any kind. They mainly tended to turn up in our favorite freestyle adventure venues, doing impossible things. We thought there were three of them. Their fancy dress varied, but there were three costumes that seemed to be the default. We thought they were kids. Adults who spend as much time as my brother and I lying around playing computer games are usually very sad, and these people were not sad, they were smart. Just very, very irritating. We’d been talking for ages about getting them thrown out of the hub. But when we put our complaints together, and thought about paging the hub sysop, we knew it sounded futile. No adult would understand about a wrecked atmosphere or the sacredness of respecting the reality of a make-believe environment. It was a victimless crime.

  “They put our lives at risk,” suggested my brother. “Tempting us to go off the map like that. We could have got drowned and gone into shock.”

  Neither of us like the sound of that. It was whiny and stupid.

  We felt we had to lie low, so we couldn’t go back to the resort reedbeds to see if that flaw was still there and try going through it again. Dev wanted to do a massive search through every location where we’d spotted them, and keep tracking around and around until we nailed them again. But I said wait. Chances are they’ve spotted us, the same way we’ve spotted them. Don’t draw attention, wait for an opportunity.

  We were snowboarding in a place called Norwegian Blue. We were on a secret level, but not off the map: cross-trekking over tableland to reach the most incredible of the black slopes. Including one with a near vertical drop of a thousand feet into a fjord, and halfway down you hit the trees and you had to slalom like a deranged rattlesnake— an unbelievably wonderful experience.

  It was night, blood-tingling cold under frosty stars. Everything was blue-tinged, otherworldly. We talked about deranged rattlesnakes, snowland bivvy building, triple flips, trapping for furs. New angles we might be able to wrangle with Norwegian Blue code; things we better not try. And, of course, the cheats.

  “I’m beginning to wonder if we’re getting stalked,” I said as we scooted our boards one-footed up a long, shallow slope. “We keep running into these same people, lurking in our ‘scapes? Maybe there’s a reason. Maybe they’re following us around. But why? It’s starting to feel weird.”

  The tableland was a sea of great smooth frozen snow-waves. We reached a crest, rode on our bellies down the scarp, sailed far out into the hollow between two waves, and started another slow ascent. The air smelled of snow, crisp frost dusted our eyelashes, and my leg muscles pumped, easy and strong. I was annoyed with myself for raising the subject. The cheats were here even when they weren’t here: stealing the beauty, making us feel watched.

  “It’s not us,” said Dev. “It’s hub access. You couldn’t do the kind of cheats they do on general-public access levels. You need rich code. That’s why we keep running into them. Kill Bill can go on getting chucked off forever, there’s millions of servers—”

  “Yeah.”

  There’s no such thing as getting banned from all the general access servers. Not unless you’re an actual criminal, a child molester or something.

  “Our cheats haven’t got many venues to choose from, if they want to fool around the way they do. It’s our bad luck they happen to be the same venues that we like.”

  I told you: Dev sees things. It was obvious, and I felt stupid. Also slightly creeped, wondering if we were ever going to be free of this nagging intrusion—

  The black silhouette of another trekker appeared, off to our left, beyond the ice field that was the danger zone on this cross-trek, the place you had to avoid ending up. I knew it had to be one of them. I hissed at Dev, “Look!”

  We dropped to the snow, and I pulled up our powerful binoculars.

  “It’s Nostromo,” I breathed. “Take a look.”

  One of the three default costumes was white overalls, with grease stains, and a NOSTROMO baseball cap. That’s what this guy was wearing, in the middle of the snowy Norwegian wilderness. Dev took a look, and we grinned at each other.

  “We have a deserter from that space freighter in Alien.”

  We’d played Alien Trilogy Remastered, but maybe Dev had been too young, and the horror immersion effects too strong. Mom and Dad had put the Dev wakes up screaming; we find this antisocial veto on it, to my regret.

  “Lost on this icy planet,” agreed Dev. “Unknown to him, he is being watched!”

  “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” I whispered, meaning: we can’t ignore them, but we can turn them into characters in our plot. We can hunt them down.

  “If it bleeds, we can kill it,” said Dev. “Do we have any weapons?”

  “Soon can have,” said I. “Let’s arm ourselves.”

  I then tried to argue Dev out of the heavy hardware. I don’t like guns. I prefer a knife or a garrote. “You can’t cheat on the weight or you’ll lose firepower.”

  “I won’t slow us down. I’m very strong.”

  “Yes, you will, and anyway using guns at hub level is really bad for your brain. It wears out the violence inhibitors in your frontal lobes. They get fired up again and again, for no reason, and they don’t understand.”

  “You talk about your brain as if it’s a pet animal.”

  “At least my pet animal gets properly fed and looked after. Yours is starving in a dirty hutch with half a rotten carrot.”

  “Your
brain is the brain of a sick, sick, blood-daubed commando.”

  “Yeah, well, I want to feel something when I kill someone. That’s not sick, it’s emotionally much more healthy than—”

  We were having this charming conversation, pulling up our weapons of choice, cutting across to intersect with Nostromo’s path, and still looking for one more beautiful belly-glide, all at the same time. If we’d been thinking, we’d have known that there had to be a flaw, and we were liable to run into it. If we’d been believing in the game, we would not have been scooting along side by side on an ice field. That’s nuts. But we were distracted, and it just happened. A crevasse opened; we both fell into it, cursing like mad as the blue-white gleaming walls flew by. We pulled our ripcords, but the fall did not slow down. Instead, everything went black.

  Black fade to gray, gray fade to blue. I sat up. I felt shaken and my head was ringing, but no bad bruises and no breakages. Health okay. Dev was beside me, doing the same check. Our snowboards lay near, looking supremely useless on a green, grassy field of boulders. The sky was more violet than blue, suggesting high altitude. The sun had an orangey tinge, and it felt hot, with the clear heat that you get in summer mountains. I had the feeling we were not in Norway anymore. The mountain peaks all around us, beautiful as any I’d ever seen, seemed far higher than that.

  “Where are we?” gasped Dev. He was looking sick; the fall must have knocked more off his health than it had off mine. I thought I’d better pull up the first aid.

  “South America,” I guessed. “Up in the Andes. Or else a fantasy world.”

  “How are we going to get back?”

  I thought that was a dumb question, and maybe he was stunned: then I realized I could not get at the first aid. I could not get at anything in my cache. I had the clothes I’d been wearing in Norwegian Blue, my knife, my garrote, and my vital signs patch. Nothing else—

  “My God! They’ve wiped us!”

  “Rebuild!” cried Dev, in a panic. “Rebuild! Quickly!”

  But I couldn’t rebuild. I couldn’t get to the code. Nor could Dev. The world around us was solid, no glitches; nothing seemed to be wrong, but we were helpless.

  We stared at each other, outraged. “This means war,” I said through gritted teeth.

  There wasn’t a doubt in our minds that the cheats had done this. Nostromo had seen us chasing him, written that crevasse where we were bound to hit it, and wiped us down to zero. We got up and walked around, abandoning our useless boards. Dev threw rocks; I dug my hands into the crispy turf. It felt real the way only the best hub code feels: intense. The whole boulder field seemed to be live, none of it just decor.

  “They’re here somewhere,” I said. “They have to be.”

  “They don’t,” said Dev, unhappily. “They could have dumped us here helpless and gone off laughing. Syl, where are we? I thought we knew all the hub venues, but I’m sure we’ve never been here before.”

  I wished I had the first aid. My brother wasn’t looking good. I was afraid he would log out on me, and I knew I’d have to go home with him.

  “C’mon, Dev. Get on the program. They lured us into this mountain world the way they lured us into the white water. Yeah, it’s unfamiliar, but we didn’t know there was white water in the resort reedbeds until we went through that flaw. These guys are good; they’ve found more secret levels than we have. But we’re good too.”

  Something nagged at me, something bigger than I could believe, but I clung to my common sense. “This is a live area. There’s probably stuff to do here, if we knew the game or if we had a guide. But there’ll be ways out. We’ll find one, figure out how to undo what they did to our cache, and get back on the bad guys’ trail.”

  The orange sun moved toward its setting. We saw some wea-selly sort of creatures, only with more legs, that watched us from a distance. We met huge golden-furred spiders, the size of a cat, who were shy but friendly. They’d come up to us and lay a palp—I mean, one of their front feet—on our hands, and look at us with big ruby eyes. They seemed to like being stroked and scratched behind their front eyes. We thought about eating the berries that grew on the crispy turf-stuff. We didn’t find a flaw or a way out; we didn’t stumble over any puzzles or hidden treasures, though we slapped and poked at hopeful-looking rocks until our hands were sore.

  Finally we found the cheats. They were camped in a ravine on what I thought of as the southern end of the boulder field (in relation to that sunset). They had a little dome shelter, a hummocky thing thatched with the lichen—I couldn’t see how it was held up. There was a fire in a circle of stones, a bucket on a flat rock by the stream that ran by their hideout. We were sick with envy. We didn’t know how much real time had passed—the time counters on our vital signs patches had stopped when we fell in here—but it felt as if we’d been wandering, naked, clueless, unable to touch a line of code, for hours.

  “Dev,” I whispered, “you’re going to go down there and tell them your sister is out on the hillside, health gone. Tell them you don’t know what to do, because I’m refusing to log out, but I’m going into shock. White flag, surrender. Cry, if you can.”

  “That won’t be hard.”

  “Okay, you bring one of them, and I’ll be waiting in ambush.”

  “Pick them off one by one,” he agreed. “Cool.”

  He was still looking sick, but he was back in the game. I remembered the flash of an adult face I’d seen in the reedbeds back at the resort, and I felt unsure. Had that been real or costume? Usually adults who play games obsessively are harmless losers, but there are the rare, supergeek predators, and they can use code; they don’t have to wait until they can get you alone in the real world—

  But we chose our ambush, and I felt better.

  “Go on. Bring me back a fine fat cheat to choke.”

  The sun was darkening to blood color as it hit the horizon, and I could feel the growing chill through my Norwegian Blue snow-boarding clothes. I clung to the wire looped over my gloved hands, feeling weirdly that the garrote was part of me, a lifeline to the normal world, and if it vanished I would be trapped—

  Dev came back up from the ravine, one of the cheats following close behind. It was the Native American one, now wearing a red-and-black blanket around his shoulders like a cloak. My brother looked very small and defenseless. Sometimes when I get to the point, it’s hard to kill, but this time I had no trouble at all. I jumped, my wire snapped around the man’s throat—but at the same moment somebody grabbed me from behind, by the forearms, and I had to let go or they’d have broken my bones. It was the Nostromo crewman. I screamed and I kicked and I yelled; it was useless. He held me off the ground and shook me like a rag doll, laughing.

  They carried us down to their camp, tied us up, and sat looking at us, cross-legged, grinning in triumph. Their eyes glittered. Up close, I knew they were adults, and I was scared.

  The pirate was a woman. She was about six feet tall. She had black hair that hung in wild locks from under her three-cornered hat, greenish brown eyes with kohl around them, and skin the color of cinnamon. She swept to her feet in one slick movement, grabbed my head, and stuck a slip of paper underneath my tongue.

  “They’re short of glucose,” she announced. “Near to blacking out. What’ll we do with them, Mister Parker? Qua’as?”

  “I say we smoke a pipe of peace,” said the Native American.

  He didn’t pull the pipe up. He fetched it from his pack, stuffed it from a pouch he wore at his waist, and lit it with a handful of the licheny stuff that he’d dipped in the flame of the brazier. My skin began to creep and my heart began to beat like thunder, and I didn’t know why. “Mister Parker,” the Nostromo crewman, cut our hands loose. The pipe went around and I drew in the “smoke.” The sugar rush almost knocked me sideways, but I managed to keep a straight face.

  “Oooh, that was restorative!” gasped the Nostromo crewman.

  “Best drug in the universe,” chuckled the pirate queen.

&nb
sp; “Gonna be our major export one day—”

  “Moron. The galaxy is full of sugars. My money’s on Bach.”

  The three cheats laughed, high-fived each other, and kind of sparkled; and I understood why, because I desperately love and depend on glucose too. But the Native American looked at my brother and frowned. Dev was not looking restored.

  We finished the pipe and the pirate queen put it aside.

  “Now,” she said, in a rich, wild, laughing voice. “I’m Bonny.” She tossed back the lace at her cuff and tipped a lean brown hand to the man in the red-and-black blanket. “This is Qua’as, the Transformer. He’s Canadian, but don’t hold that against him, he’s pretty cool; and Mister Parker, our engineer, you have met. So, who the devil are you, and why are you messing with us? Do tell.”

  “Get real,” growled Mr. Parker, “if you’ll pardon the expression. There are only, what is it? F-fourteen other people that you could be, assumin’ you are not some kooky software dreamed up by Mission Control. So why the disguises? What the hell are you playing at? What was that with the garrote?”

  “Did no one ever tell you, little sister,” said Qua’as, “that only that which is dearest to your heart survives the drop back into normal space? What does that make you? A low-down disgusting violence perv? Eh? Eh?”

  That was when I realized for the first time that I’d kept my weapons, but Dev’s AK and ammo had gone when we were wiped to zero. I felt myself blush; I felt that Qua’as was right . . . I was so totally immersed in this game, so believing in it. I had the scariest feeling that I was losing touch with my physical self, back at home—

  “Let us go!” cried Dev. “We’re not afraid of you! We tracked you down! We’ll turn you in to the sysop, the moment we log out!”

  My brother’s voice sounded thin and frail, a ghost’s voice. But the cheats were glowing with life and strength and richness. They were richer than any game avatar I’d ever heard of. I could feel them teeming with complexity, buzzing with layers and layers of detail, deeper than my mind could reach. It was very, very weird—