Level Zero

by Jaron Lee Knuth

  And they keep getting closer.

  001101

  It's a losing battle, but I keep firing, hoping I will be awarded Koins for how many of the beasts I can take down before I die.

  I'm spending too much time focusing on the wall of creatures coming from the left, and I don't see one of the aliens leap over a pile of corpses on my right. With two huge bounds, stretching its arms and legs as far as it can, it takes a final pounce toward me. It's too late. I can see its mouth opening, its teeth glittering in the lights, its tongue slathering spit from side-to-side, salivating at the thought of my blood.

  Before my brain can register what is happening, the alien's head is separated from its body, both of which fall to the ground, hard. My trigger finger stalls for a second as I watch it collapse. I'm frozen in place, trying to catch up with what's happening.

  “Keep firing, Cowboy!”

  I hear the voice from behind me. It's a girl's voice, but it sounds husky and aggressive, twinged with that Nu-Chinese accent that all the “cool kids” are using.

  I see another group of aliens getting close to me, and my brain is summoned back to the present. My finger twitches, and the bullets from my guns pound into the aliens again. I want to look behind me, but there's too many creatures. I can't keep my eyes off of them. I can't stop judging their distance, and using instant calculations as to which enemy to fire at next.

  The girl behind me steps up to protect my flank from another group of aliens that are trying to sneak around a small rock formation. She's wearing a white kimono covered in yellow flowers, the silky material moving more like air than cloth. Her emotionless face is painted white, and her white hair is pulled up tight into two separate pigtails. She's holding a wide-bladed sword that looks like it's twice her size, nearly a foot wide, and would require two hands to wield, but she's twirling it around in one hand like it weighs nothing.

  “Stay focused, yo,” she says.

  I keep firing, but my mind is split between my shooting strategy and the arrival of this new player. Is she trying to work with me, or is she trying steal my quest? I consider blasting her while her back is turned, but I know that without her, I'm dead anyway.

  When the group of aliens moves around the rock formation, the sword-wielding girl steps into position. Her movements are too fast to be real. She flashes across a twenty yard distance like an instant strike of lightning. She rotates her sword in an arc that splatters the entire group in a spinning blender of gore. Then she's back at my side in another flash.

  “We need to like, destroy that spaceship, yo. It just keeps creating more,” she yells over the flare of my gun.

  “I noticed,” I say. “How do you suggest we do that?”

  She squints her eyes, looking past the mob of creatures I'm cutting down. There's a wall of bodies that the aliens are climbing over to get to us. It's slowing them down, but it's making it harder to judge their momentum, too.

  “See the engine?” she yells, pointing at the ship. “It's like, glowing. Like, it's ruptured or whatever. That fuel looks volatile, yo.”

  Her Nu-Chinese slang is young and makes me want to write her off, but I take a quick glance, and I see what she's talking about.

  “I can't risk igniting it or whatever with my sword. I'd be too close to the explosion. I'll like, make an opening, yo. You take the shot, Cowboy.”

  She doesn't even wait for me to agree to the strategy. She zips into the fray, swinging her sword to each side of her, slicing a path through the mob of beasts. In only a few seconds, there's a clear path straight toward the ship. I ignore the instinct to keep firing at the aliens that are near me and turn my guns. I focus both barrels on the glowing, toxic fuel that's pouring onto the ground. I pull both triggers at the same time, and the fuel ignites.

  The sword-wielding girl is already dashing away when the ship explodes, but we're both thrown on our backs from the concussive blast that emanates out from the ship in a glowing ring of energy. The sound makes my ears whine, and my eyes are blinded for a moment. When I catch my breath, and my eyes finally focus, I hear the announcer's voice.

  “Quest completed. You have earned 3,000 Koins.”

  I rub my eyes, trying to help them focus, and when I open them again, the girl dressed in a kimono is looking down at me.

  “You're like, welcome, yo,” she says with a sarcastic tone.

  I'm waiting for her sword to impale me in a coup de grace, but instead she offers me her hand to help me to my feet. I accept it, and when our hands touch, the familiar options of YES and NO pop up in front of me.

  I hear the announcer ask, “Would you like to form a group?”

  I hesitate longer than I did with Xen, and the girl is doing the same. We stand amongst the wreckage in the park, bodies burning all around us, but we're staring at each other. She's judging me with her eyes, sizing me up.

  “I don't even know your name,” I say.

  She doesn't say anything for an uncomfortably long time, but she finally sighs and says, “I'm Fantom, yo.”

  I tip my hat. “Arkade.”

  We both stand in silence, waiting for each other to make the decision on grouping. I still don't want her help, but I'm starting to realize I might need it. As long as it benefits me, maybe that outweighs the annoyance of interacting with another person.

  I reach out and touch the YES that's floating in front of me. She slowly raises her hand and touches her own YES button. The glowing border surrounds her, and her location appears on my map.

  “So you like, figured out questing or whatever. Good for you,” she says, sheathing her sword.

  “It's worth more Koins,” I say with a dull tone, stating a fact and nothing more.

  We both turn when we hear gunfire nearby.

  Fantom laughs. “Yeah, well, not everyone has that like, figured out or whatever.”

  “They're still playing the old game, and until they learn the new rules, they'll just continue doing what they know.”

  Fantom shrugs her shoulders. “Like, more Koins for us, yo.”

  “Exactly,” I say with a smile. I point toward the pizza parlor. “I've got a vehicle. We should get moving to the next quest before any nosy players come to check out the explosion.”

  She gestures with her hand and says, “Lead the way, yo.”

  We both hop the fence, and Fantom follows me to the jeep.

  “Fun,” she says, jumping into the back and gripping both of her hands onto the mounted machine gun.

  “Glad you like it.” I climb into the driver's seat. “It'll be nice to have someone to fire that thing.”

  I zoom in on my map window and check for the next closest quest. I find another one, but it's built for a Level 2 player. Now that we have a group, I'm willing to take on something a little harder.

  “What Level are you?”

  “Level 7, yo.” She spins the gun around, testing its pivot speed. “What about you?”

  I'm embarrassed to tell her, so all I say is, “Close to that.” Then I direct the conversation back at her. “Why were you doing such a low Level quest?”

  She doesn't look at me, giving the question very little thought. “I wasn't doing the quest, Cowboy. I was just helping you out or whatever.”

  “You're that altruistic?”

  “Not really. But I figured I could like, level even faster if I had someone watching my back or whatever.”

  I frown, not completely believing her. “So... why me?”

  “Why not? If you figured out quests so quickly, then I can like, only guess that you must be a decent player or whatever.”

  She says it with a sarcastic tone, but I think it's meant to be playful. I have a hard enough time reading people, and I'm starting to think her painted face is actually designed not to show any emotion.

  “Like seriously, Cowboy. I can tell you're good, yo. You must have played the original game before.”

  I don't want to appear smug about anything she's saying, so as I start the engine of t
he jeep, I shrug my shoulders. “It's a whole new game now.”

  001110

  We play for six straight hours. Fantom is an amazing player, and I'm surprised that I've never seen her name on the old DangerWar scoreboard. She's quick-minded, making decisions on the fly that are always correct. If she moves right, death will be waiting for us on the left, and vice versa. I quickly learned that if she told me to duck, I should kiss the floor. But she isn't trying to run the show, either. She has a great attitude about our group. She trusts my skills as a player, and as my Levels grow over the next few hours, I start to trust myself. The game really isn't all that different, and once I click into the mechanics, I'm liquid death.

  At first I think Fantom is as focused on the game as I am, but over the course of the six hours, during our moments of downtime between quests, she keeps bringing up real world issues. When we're crawling through a sewer, hunting down the alligator-men who are threatening the city, she goes on and on about the global-political racism toward North Americans. I try to bring the subject matter back to the game by asking her to show me her inventory.

  “Like, why?”

  “We need to understand each other's capabilities if we want to make sound decisions. Our strategy depends on it.”

  She agrees and we reveal our windows to each other. Her lightning fast movements are based on a rare magical ring that a quest boss dropped early in the game. It feels unbalanced for a low Level item, but as long as she's in my group, I'm not going to complain. I ask her about her lack of armor purchases, but she has an annoyingly confident explanation.

  “I don't need armor because I don't plan on getting hit, yo.”

  Where I chose endurance and spent all my extra Koins bulking out my avatar with new protective gear, she chose dexterity and is still running around with a cloth kimono. Luckily, the combination of our play styles merge well. I can take the hits in the center of the mayhem—just where I like to be—while she skirts the outside, picking off opponents with deadly accuracy.

  After six hours of questing, I already gained seven more Levels, making my avatar Level 10. Fantom reaches Level 12. The amount of Koins required to level-up increases exponentially every time you gain a new Level, so it's an ever-increasing climb to the top, but it also means I'll eventually catch up to her, and we'll be moving at the same pace.

  At nearly five in the morning, I'm leaping off of a flagpole, firing at a swarm of gargoyles perched at the top of a courthouse. I barely hear the announcer in my ear over the crack of my pistols.

  “Mandatory world-wide system reboot in thirty minutes.”

  The rare Anti-Gravity Belt that I was awarded for killing the Troll King at the end of the last quest lets me drop slowly to the ground so that I don't splatter against the street. I keep firing as I fall, chipping away at the last of the stone beasts. Finally they shatter, crumbling into pieces on the pavement below.

  Fantom comes bursting from a window, her sword impaled in the wizard we were hunting down who, according to the quest description, had taken the mayor of DangerWar City hostage. She rips her sword from the wizard's chest and leaps off of his falling corpse, launching herself toward my slow descent. I toss my gun into my other hand and reach out as far as I can. Our fingers touch, and I grasp tightly, catching her at the last second. I hear her let out a gasp as she swings below me, pulling my body faster toward the ground, but still at a safe speed. The landing is rough, but we wipe ourselves off and accept our Koins for completing yet another quest.

  “Nice job,” Fantom says, sliding her sword into the sheath on her back. “That was a close one, yo.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “You're telling me. What were you doing in there?”

  “Exactly what I said I was going to do, yo. Thanks for like, keeping his minions off of me or whatever.”

  I chuckle to myself and say, “I don't remember you leaping out of the window, just as I was falling past, to be part of the plan.”

  She shrugs her shoulders and walks back toward the jeep, speaking over her shoulder. “I had to like, improvise or whatever.”

  We both sit in the front of the vehicle, relaxing as we gesture through our own windows, checking stats and quest locations. I see a nearby quest, but I'm not sure we'll have time to complete it. It would be useless to start if the system reboots before we can finish.

  “Did you hear the announcement?”

  Fantom nods. “Yeah. Are you going to like, disconnect for the night or whatever?”

  “Not a chance,” I say. “It's Saturday. There's no school. I'm playing as much as I can this weekend.”

  She grins and looks at me out of the corner of her eye. “Yo. You're like, still in school?”

  I feel my face swell up, and I'm glad my avatar can't portray embarrassment. “Um. I mean... sort of.”

  She keeps grinning but turns her attention back to the windows in front of her. “You seem older than that. You don't act like a kid or whatever.”

  “I'm almost sixteen.”

  “Okay,” she says, sounding as if she really doesn't care, either way.

  “How old are you?” I ask, figuring with her pension for Nu-Chinese that she must be young.

  She makes a few more gestures and then takes one long swipe to close all the windows. She turns in her seat and looks at me. “Does it like, matter?”

  I consider the question. “Actually, no.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I like, sort of figured, yo.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She lets out an annoyed sigh and says, “It means... I get the feeling like, from our few conversations or whatever, that you don't really care about the real world. I get the feeling that this game is more important to you than like, the real world or whatever. It's cool, yo. There's a lot of kids out there like you.”

  I roll my eyes. Now she sounds like an adult. The way she talks about the real world solidifies in my mind that she's one of “them.” Someone like my father. Someone who still clings to the ideal that the real world has some value left to it. And to her, I'm on the other side, which is truer than she knows.

  “Yeah,” I say, speaking with a defiant tone, “you're right. I think anyone who would choose the cold, empty existence of the real world over this-” I wave my hands around, indicating the entire game world of DangerWar. “I think that person has something wrong with them. Or they're just stubborn. There's no logical reason why someone would think that the real world is better than NextWorld.”

  “Not everyone's real world is cold and empty, yo. And the real world is like, you know, real.”

  “And this isn't?”

  “I'm wearing a kimono, with like, a huge sword strapped to my back, and I just killed a wizard, yo.”

  “What's your point?”

  She laughs. I don't join in her laughter.

  “I'm serious.”

  She looks at me, surprised by my directness, then rubs her eyes and says, “Because, this is all like, in your head, yo. Your body or whatever has nothing to do with this.”

  “And why is my body important? Isn't my mind who I actually am? As long as my brain is present, then so am I.”

  “Whatever, yo,” she says. “You sound like my philosophy teacher.”

  I smile. “So you're still in school, too?”

  She scoffs. “Barely. I'm like, going to the University next year.”

  I roll my eyes. “It's still DotEdu.”

  “Yeah, but I get like, real people teaching me, not some NPC or whatever.”

  “Real? But it's still an avatar. According to you, that's not real at all.”

  “You know what I mean, yo.”

  “Yeah, I do. But I'm not sure you know what you mean.”

  There's a pause as the thought sinks in.

  “Yo. You are like, extremely frustrating.”

  I shrug my shoulders, and a mocking grin creeps across my face. The announcer breaks up the debate.

  “Mandatory world-wide system reboot in ten minutes.�
�

  Fantom stretches her arms. “I'm going to log out. I hate the shock or whatever to my system when I'm forced out during a reboot.”

  “Okay,” I say. “I'm going to try and do some shopping while I can. Will I see you after the reboot?”

  She smiles and says, “I'm not sure, Cowboy. I guess you'll have to like, wait and see. There might be something better happening in the real world, you know?”

  Before I can answer, her avatar lowers in resolution, turning into fewer and fewer pixels until it completely disappears.

  “Group member Fantom has left the game.”

  I start up the engine and pull out from the curb, weaving through traffic. I hear no gunfire and see no players. I feel like the last man alive. This is the dead time, the time of day when the fewest possible players are logged in. It's why the system operators choose this time to reboot the game world. It interrupts the experience for the fewest players.

  I reach the equipment shop with only a minute to spare. I park the jeep next to the destroyed lamp post and climb out. Instead of going inside, I climb to the top of the equipment store and watch the game world reboot from the rooftop. I guess it's the gamer's version of watching the sunset.

  A timer appears during the last sixty seconds, counting down until the reboot. Off in the distance, I see that same jet fighter that Xen wants to fly so badly skimming through the clouds. It makes me think of him. I'm dreading the concert. Not because I have to meet his girlfriend, or sit through some music I probably won't like, but because it will take me out of the game during a prime gaming hour. Who knows how many Koins Fantom will be able to rack up while I'm gone?