Expedition- Summerlands

by Nathaniel Webb

  The Summerlands had been open for five years. Beta-tester spots were a quarter million each; tickets were down to two hundred thousand at the official launch. After the early adopters and rich kids had bought in, and especially once people started getting killed, the real price cuts began.

  My friends and I had spent that entire time saving money. We’d played a lot of other games: Expedition’s VR offerings, old 2D games that Keats had collected, even some pen-and-paper roleplaying games. But the Summerlands captured our imagination instantly. It promised an exit from the gray landscape around us and, more than that, it was a place with a whole new set of rules.

  In the Summerlands, it would be us against the world. The treasure that hid underground was ours for the taking. The monsters that stood between us and glory could be slain. Everyone started with nothing; everyone lived or died by their skill alone. That was more than could be said for real life.

  Hearthammer

  All four members of my would-be adventuring party lived in the same apartment block, a cross made up of four twenty-story buildings with a small shared outdoor space in the center. As I turned from the street to the weedy cement path that led to my door, a few kids from the block ran past, laughing as they chased after a dust-caked ball.

  “You there!”

  I had my head down as I rounded the last corner between me and my door, so I saw the cop’s gleaming black boots first. My heart choked and froze. As I looked up in resignation I took in the heavy slate-grey jodhpurs, black leather belt slung with gear, Kevlar vest, and rifle butt jutting out from behind it all, but when I finally saw the deep scowl creasing the cop’s face, I burst out laughing.

  “Christ, Keats, you scared me!”

  “I got you, didn’t I?” David Keats’s face split in a grin. Raising Cassidy and Jason on his own had given Keats a knack for throwing on a serious face at a moment’s notice, but if you knew him well enough, you could see the laughter in his pale blue eyes no matter how hard he tried to hide it.

  “God, I really bought it, too. I should have known.” I shook my head to try and hide my own smile. “And you shouldn’t be lurking around scaring people.”

  “Lurking around scaring people is half my job,” said Keats. “But actually I just wanted to invite you to dinner. You eaten yet?”

  “You know I haven’t. Stopping for fast food isn’t on the Cassidy Keats fantasy adventure diet plan.”

  “Perfect.” He slapped me on the shoulder. “Come on, you can wake Jason up for his shift.”

  “You know,” I said as Keats held the rusting metal door of our building open for me, “you probably don’t have to personally invite me to dine every single night.”

  “No?” he asked, following me in. The long hallway light flickered and buzzed above our heads as the door clicked shut and I thought for the hundredth time that I really ought to rewire it.

  “I mean, I think Noah and I have just assumed a standing invitation for the last few years.”

  “Well,” said Keats, adjusting the shoulder strap of his Armalite, “there’s nothing wrong with a little etiquette. Even if the world is rude, we can still be polite.”

  “That’s very deep, Keats,” I said, and he laughed. “Speaking of polite, any chance tonight will be the night?”

  We were side by side on the clanging metal fire stairs now—the elevators had been busted since before I was born—and I could see the shine of sweat at Keats’s receding hairline. He was a strong man, a full six feet tall with thick arms, but over my lifetime I’d watched his belly grow steadily out over his belt. He took a wheezy breath before he replied, “Night for what?”

  “The night you finally let me pay for dinner. Or at least some of it.” Keats was already shaking his head, but I soldiered on. “C’mon, I just got paid. Let me cover my part, at least.”

  “No chance,” he puffed. “Least I can do is feed my kids, Emma.”

  “You know I’m not actually your kid, right? And neither is Noah. At best we’ve got squatter’s rights.”

  David Keats just shrugged and shifted his assault rifle on his shoulder.

  ***

  Jason, the younger of Keats’s two kids and the junior member of our adventuring party, was snoring terribly, tangled in the sheets of the upper bunkbed in the room he shared with his sister Cass. I reached up and shoved the metal lattice beneath his mattress, bouncing him awake as I sang, “You gotta get up in the morning, you gotta get up with the sun…”

  Jason half-fell, half-slid down the ladder, his eyes still closed. He was naked except for a pair of ratty boxers; the Keats family’s apartment captured a lot of the heat from the lower floors, a blessing in winter and a curse the other ten months of the year.

  As Jason stumbled around his room, looking for pants and quietly cursing me, I couldn’t help but appreciate how much he’d changed. His father’s pale blue eyes still shone bright against his mother’s brown skin, but he’d grown a few more inches in the last year. Between his factory job, our relentless combat practice, and a decent diet—we had Cass to thank for the last two—he’d put on a lot of muscle as well. He’d recently buzzed his thick brown hair, and the short cut drew attention to the sharp angles of his new cheekbones and jawline.

  I wasn’t about to say all that, though, so instead I told him he was a lazy bum who slept all day.

  “All day? All day?” he grumbled from behind his open closet door. I watched the old boxers come flying over the door and saw a foot and a hint of calf as he stood one-legged to pull new ones on. “All day I’m in school. All night I work.”

  “Yeah, what are roll bars, anyway?” I teased, but he ignored me.

  “Not being a dropout makes Dad happy, so school, that’s Dad Time. I work four hours a night and save every penny for my ticket, so that’s Summerlands Time. But afternoon—that’s naptime. That’s Jason Time.” He came out from behind the closet door, wearing a blue factory jumpsuit with the name “Buck” stitched onto a tag on the chest. “Why am I awake, Emma? What happened to Jason Time?”

  “It’s not Jason Time,” I replied. “It’s dinner time. C’mon, Buck.”

  He sighed dramatically. “Only one more year to graduation. Then I can go full-time and really live my dream of being a factory worker.”

  “I won’t stand for that kind of talk, adventurer!” barked Cass from the doorway. Jason stiffened to mock attention, then ducked sharply as Cass flung a sweaty towel at him. She was two inches shorter than her younger brother and slimmer and she looked like a color-inverted photo of him with her father’s sun-reddened white skin and her mother’s deep brown eyes. They shared the same cheekbones, though, and in a sweat-darkened gray tank top her muscles stood out just as sharply, toned from five years of drawing a heavy yew longbow. Her hair was clipped as short as Jason’s on the sides, with an unruly brown tangle on top.

  “How are the piggy banks?” I asked, just as Cass dove her sweat-gleaming face into a fresh towel. Cass was a personal trainer, trying to reverse years of neglectful parenting that had led the children of wealthy families to obesity. The job had always struck me as a ridiculous luxury. It was hard to blame the kids I’d grown up with for being so unhealthy, considering a sugared meat patty at Cluck-a-Duck’s was the cheapest meal in town by far, but surely the few rich families, the ones with houses to themselves, could put real food on the table every night.

  “I get paid to work out,” replied Cass, coming up for air. That was how she always deflected the question, but she loved to run and jump and climb on obstacle courses she built for kids who were, like all of us, huge fans of Summerlands streams. I’d once watched her grab a wooden sword and chase a group of eight-year-olds in a circle for half an hour as they shrieked with laughter, yelling that she was an elf come back to steal their gold.

  “Hey,” said Jason suddenly. He was looking down at his phone, his dark eyebrows pressed together. “Do you guys remember Terra?”

  “Your online girlfriend?” said Cass.


  “She’s not—” Jason started.

  “She’s just a girl who’s your friend. Online.” Cass laughed as Jason blushed. “Oh, and I’ve never met her because she’s from the EU.”

  “What about her?” I asked.

  “Well, we haven’t talked in a while,” Jason said. “I’ve been busy with school and work and everything. But she just messaged me out of the blue. It just says ‘Summerlands Discovery, 2054.’ And…” He held up his phone. “There’s like ten megs of files attached.”

  “It’s probably a virus,” I said. “Her account got hacked or something. You shouldn’t open it.”

  “I guess.” Jason stuck his phone in a pocket of his jumpsuit. “Come on, I’m hungry.”

  ***

  With Jason and Cass more or less dressed and clean, we crossed the hall to the Keatses’s little kitchenette-slash-dining room. Their apartment was cozy and simple. The front door opened into a hallway with four doors: Jason and Cass’s room was on the left, followed by the bathroom, and on the right were the kitchen and Keats’s room. As an only child I could only guess at the morning havoc in the bathroom, but otherwise it seemed like a nice place to grow up.

  In the kitchen, Keats stood at the stove, flipping protein slabs on a frying pan like a chef in an ad for an upscale pancake house. On the second burner a pot of pasta was boiling.

  “Looks perfect, Dad,” said Cass as we came in.

  “Looks boring, you mean,” said Keats with a laugh. He uncomplainingly cooked Cass’s training diet for us morning and night, but during the day I think he had no compunctions helping himself to whatever snacks the police department’s corporate sponsors had left at the station.

  “Where’s Noah?” asked Jason. “He’s never late for dinner.” Noah García Benatar was the fourth member of our party and Jason was right; Noah never missed a meal at the Keatses’s place.

  “Good question.” Keats banged on the wall above the stove with his spatula. “Noah! Food!” A moment later, Noah appeared at the door of the kitchenette, an open book in one hand and two more in the other. He had thick, wavy black hair and thick eyebrows, and a long nose below wide, brown eyes. He was shorter than even me, but much broader, another of Cass’s training success stories.

  “Noah, how long have you been in my room?” Keats asked. His bedroom was on the other side of the wall, just big enough for a twin bed and a tall bookshelf overflowing with science-fiction novels from the last century.

  “You said I could look at the new books you got,” said Noah matter-of-factly.

  “That was…” Keats glanced at his police-issue phone on the counter. “Nine hours ago.”

  “Oh,” said Noah. He had a funny sort of straightforwardness to him, like he didn’t really understand everyday concepts such as boredom or fatigue or laziness. When he found a book he liked, he would read it until he finished it or somebody told him to stop. When Cass told him he needed to start doing an hour of cardio and two of weights daily, he was out in the dust fields the next day lifting and running in the hazy orange sunlight. It was as though the idea of not doing something simply never occurred to him.

  Naturally, this made it hard for most people to understand him and Noah had been pretty badly bullied at school until he found us. On top of his dedication to our training, he was our walking encyclopedia, even more obsessed with the Summerlands than the rest of us. He usually didn’t say much, but if you got him going on some piece of lore he could talk forever. Two years earlier, we’d taken the bus to San Diego for a Summerlands fan convention. I sat next to him and he spent the entire three hours telling me how every mountain in the Summerlands had gotten its name.

  We adored him.

  ***

  Protein chopped into pasta made a filling, if bland, meal, and after we’d all had enough we sat around the Keatses’s chipped formica table, momentarily too full to move.

  “So, I have an announcement,” I said, breaking the contented silence. Cass sat up straight, her eyes keen. Jason raised an eyebrow. Even Noah looked up from his book. I cleared my throat a couple times, then, deciding to go for forthrightness over showmanship, dove in.

  “Once I put today’s paycard in the bank, I’ll have a little over ten thousand—”

  The room went off like a fireball spell. Cass leapt up with a whoop, knocking over her chair; Noah was smiling and clapping; Jason and his dad were shouting “Did you know? I didn’t know!” back and forth at each other. I just sat there, feeling my cheeks grow red-hot.

  “It’s not that big a deal,” I eventually interjected. “We still have to get you guys to ten k.”

  “Are you excited?” asked Noah. “You don’t seem excited.”

  “No, I’m excited,” I insisted. “Just… it’s just a lot more real now, that’s all.”

  “What?” Cass yelped. “Don’t tell me you’re getting cold feet now! It’s finally happening for us!”

  “No, no, of course not,” I stammered. “I just…” I trailed off.

  “I have a question,” said Keats, changing the subject with merciful bluntness. “Before you actually get there—what are you all looking forward to most about the Summerlands? Cass?”

  “Kicking ass, obviously,” said Cass, still standing over me with her hands on her hips. She hadn’t noticed her dad’s act of conversational mercy, or maybe she just couldn’t stand to miss a chance to boast. “We’re going to be the best adventuring party the Summerlands has ever seen. Untouchable.”

  “Untouchable is good,” her dad agreed. “Jason?”

  “Well, honestly…” Jason wrinkled his nose. “It’ll be kinda nice not to worry about money for once. When we start winning it, I mean. I think there’s a lot of gold still sitting out there for us to grab.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Keats, smiling. “What’s the first thing you’re gonna buy when you’re rich?”

  “A house for you,” said Jason, not meeting his dad’s eyes. “A real one.”

  “I can’t wait to meet everyone,” said Noah. “Dr Agony will be there. St George. Rad is a Hecker, you know.”

  “We know!” laughed Jason. “Hecker” was the slang term from someone from the HECZ, the Hollywood Economic Cooperation Zone. People like us. “Why do you want to meet St George? That dude’s a psycho.”

  “He seems interesting,” said Noah. “And he has more confirmed kills than any other player.”

  “How ‘bout you, Emma?” asked Keats. “What are you excited about?”

  “Everybody took mine,” I hedged, but Keats held me pinned by his stare, refusing to let me off that easily. “But I guess—okay, has it ever bothered you that there are no scientists in the Summerlands?”

  “Huh?” Cass looked blank, as did her brother, but Noah seemed attentive.

  “Well, think about it,” I went on. “The Summerlands was gamified immediately after it was discovered. Aside from the rangers, nobody’s ever really studied it, right? I mean, this whole other world and we made it into a theme park. There’s all kinds of plants and animals and elven architecture—we don’t even know for sure that the elves are all gone.”

  “Elves? Seriously?” Cass’s eyebrows drew together. Expedition Games had concluded that the elves were long dead and that was enough for her.

  “Or whatever,” I said. “But don’t you think someone should be, I don’t know, taking notes?”

  “First scientist of the Summerlands,” said Keats. He smiled, but there was a sadness in his crinkled eyes, the look of a man watching his kids grow up. “I have a feeling we’re all going to remember tonight. The first, biggest step on the road of the rest of your lives. So let me give you some fatherly advice, if that’s okay.” We all nodded, his sudden serious turn cutting through our jangled nerves.

  “Whatever happens on the other side—whether you guys get rich or get famous or decide to just stay in town and run a shop, which is fine by me, by the way, seems a lot safer than dungeon-diving—once you get to the Summerlands, you’ve already won. Just being t
here is a victory, a big one. That’s a better life than anything I could give you here.”

  He waved a big hand vaguely at the window at the back of the room, which looked out on a battered metal fire escape and a dust-choked alley beyond it. “Look at the ground. Look at the sky. You’re too young to remember how things used to be, but I’m not. I remember how it was before we all went too far as a society. So when you get there… don’t go too far.”

  ***

  After dinner, we crammed into Cass and Jason’s little room. Jason and I shared Cass’s bunk as she paced back and forth, all nervous energy. Noah sat on the floor, his nose in one of Keats’s books. There was always a calm period after dinners at the Keats apartment, perfect for just hanging out: too early for Jason to go to work, too late for me to get my paycard to the bank.

  I resolved to get up a bit early and deposit the card before practice the next morning, but for now, Noah and I both had no urge to head home. I would have just spent the night on Cass and Jason’s floor, but a gentle word from Keats had nudged me into thinking I ought to go home and give my own parents the good news… in a bit.

  Jason had his phone out again, his brows a heavy line. I’d forgotten all about his mysterious message in the excitement of my announcement, but he obviously hadn’t.

  “Seriously, don’t open that file,” I said. He tapped at the phone screen a bit but didn’t respond. I nudged him gently. “Jason, did you hear me?”

  He looked up as though he’d just realized I was sitting next to him.

  “My phone’s blank,” he said.

  “It’s what? Blank?” I asked. Noah looked up from his book, and Cass stopped pacing.

  “Look at this, it’s the startup screen.” He held his phone up, and we all peered at it. He was right; the display showed a basic user data form.

  “The only way to get that on an old phone is to do a full wipe,” I said. “I haven’t seen that screen since I bought my own after graduation. You opened the file, didn’t you?”