We had no warning when we popped back onto the map. We came flying out of the thrilling part into a wider, quieter channel, and the landscape was all different. I dipped my hand in the water, and tasted salt.
“I know where we are,” I said. “Those dunes ahead are at the end of the resort beach, this is the fishing river they have there. We can follow it to the sea, and kayak to the stand along the shore.”
My brother turned around in a big circle in the midstream. There was no sign of the cheat, not a whisker. He looked up at the clear blue sky.
“You know what we just did, Syl? We did a cheat back there. We can’t turn the pirate in now, because we’re guilty too.”
“We were off the map,” I said. “It doesn’t count.”
“Does.”
I knew he was right, by our own private laws, so I said, “The cheat-guy was an indian brave, stupid. The shell was flying a pirate flag.”
I did our splitting-trick code in reverse, faster this time, hoping not to get spotted (we weren’t), and we let the current carry us out to sea. So there we were, my brother and I: paddling along the shore. It was hardish work, plugging through the choppy little waves, but we were fine, we had lifejackets, and nobody had told us the ocean was out of bounds.
“What the hell’s that?” demanded Dev.
That was a helicopter, going rackety rackety rackety, and buzzing us, so we could hardly see for the spray it was kicking up. We saw the rescue service logo, and we were indignant. Safety was not being served!
“What are you doing?” I yelled, waving my paddle. “You’re a danger to shipping! You’ll capsize us! Go away!”
“Go and play with your stupid flying machine somewhere else!”
Next thing, we got a page. It was the pilot talking, ton of bricks style. The rescue copter was looking for us. We’d failed to return our kayak, and we were hours overdue.
We were hauled out, scolded, and reported to Mom and Dad, who yelled at us, whole anxious parent thing, but it wasn’t too bad. We made the right faces, said the right things, and it was soon over. I’ve trained Dev how to do that. He’s pretty good, by now.
When my brother was a little kid I played baby-games with him, the ones I’d loved when I was a little kid myself. We were candy-coloured happy little animals, jumping the platforms, finding the strawberries and the gold coins, we dodged the smiley asteroids in our little spaceships, we explored jungles finding magic butterflies. We raced our Chocobos. I’m naturally patient, and I love make-believe; I didn’t mind. My parents used to say, you don’t have to babysit, Sylvie, but it was hardly ever a burden. I taught him everything he needed to know, and I was proud of how quick he was. Dev is not naturally patient, but he sees things in a flash.
We drifted apart when he was aged five, six, seven. Then one day when he was eight and I was twelve he came to my room with his Talbo’ – the games platform small boys had to have at that time – and said he wanted me to play with him again.
“Girls don’t play boy games,” I told him (I was feeling depressed that day). “Boys don’t play girl games. We won’t like the same things. You just want to share my hub access, why not say so?”
“We DO like the same things,” he said. “I miss you. No one else I know gets carried away in a game like you. You make it all come real. Please. I want you to take me with you.”
So we compromised. I did let him share my hub access (with our parents approval), and use it without me. It’s true, boy games mostly bore me. Racking up kills in the war-torn desert city, team sports (Bleegggh!), racing cars, fighter jets… Leaves me cold, and I think it’s because I have the ability to get right into a game, and feel that it’s real.
I can be a Commando, I can kill. But there has to be a reason that I care about, or you might as well be playing Tick Tack Toe, as far as I’m concerned. I want to play at things I would love to do. Managing a football team? The cockpit of a fighter jet or a formula car? No thank you! I don’t want to be strapped down. I don’t want to be confined in a machine. I want to run, swim, fight: use my arms and legs.
He plays with his friends now, and I play alone. But we still have our best times together. Unlike most gamers who are good at coding on the fly, we’re not geeks. What we can do is like our magic powers. Our survival lore in the wilderness. And it’s logic. Tricks like that kayak-twinning will work with just about any big game engine.
Our parents didn’t ground us after the Rescue Helicopter incident. They only reproached us, and were sad, and generally played the tricks parents play to get you back on the leash. Luckily, everyone took our word that we’d lost track of time, and the kayaking log backed us up, because it showed us not receiving the pages telling us we were overdue.
This told us something interesting, but we kept our mouths shut. The adults blamed a paging glitch. (If they’d known we’d been off the resort world-map, for hours, things would have been different!). My brother came up with the idea that it was a time glitch, and we’d been slowed-down, in the unmapped sector, without realising it. He sat on the end of my bed, scrunching up his face. “Or speeded up. Whichever works.”
I didn’t tease him. Speeded-up/slowed down in a game is like ‘what time is it in Tokyo?’; it’s hard to keep it straight in your head. “Except we were in clock-time all along, bro. We weren’t cruising the galaxy in our hypership. We were at the resort.”
It’s a basic immersion venue. You stay for exactly the time it feels like: which is the starter level, safest way to play immersion games. The resort’s meant for little kids. We just like it.
“Maybe we really did just lose track,” said Dev.
But I knew we hadn’t. Something had happened when we went through that flaw, something sly and twisted.
“No. There’s really something screwy going on.”
Θ
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 wasted hundreds of thousands of grunts in Amerika Kombat, never seemed to tire of her guaranteed headshots: and when one immersion server threw her out, she’d log onto another. We thought we’d seen our three characters in combat games, and they were cheating-good at racking up kills, but they mostly turned up in our own favourite scapes, like kayaking in the reed-beds at the resort, but doing impossible things.
We thought there were three of them. We assumed they were kids, which ought to have narrowed it down, because few kids have the kind of hub access I have. But of course they could be logging on anywhere in the world. We’d talked about trying to turn them in. But we couldn’t figure out how to do it, if we couldn’t identify them. And when we put our complaints together they sounded futile (even if you didn’t count our own cheats against us). No adult would understand about a wrecked atmosphere, or the sacredness of respecting the reality of the make-believe. It was a victimless crime.
“They put our lives at risk?” suggested my brother. “Tempting us off the map like that. We could have got drowned and gone into shock.”
Neither of us liked the sound of that. It was whiney and stupid.
We didn’t go back to the kayaking channels, to find out if the flaw was still there. We had to lie low for a while; even though we’d escaped being blamed. Dev thought of telling someone what had really happened, not mentioning the cheats, just saying we’d hit a flaw, and letting the resort investigate. But that would be risky, because of our kayak-splitting, and I had a feeling the cheats would have covered their tracks, anyway. I said wait. They were sure to turn up again.
Θ
Well, it happened when 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 wa
s 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, and things we better not try. And of course, the cheats.
“I wonder if we’ve been being stalked,” I said, as we scooted our boards, one-footed. “We keep running into these same strange people, if they are people, lurking in our favourite ’scapes? Maybe we’re not following them: maybe they’re following us. But why? ”
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, my leg muscles pumped, easy and strong. I was annoyed with myself for even raising the subject. The cheats were here, when they weren’t here: stealing the beauty, making us feel watched.
“It’s not us they’re following,” said Dev. “It’s our hub access. You couldn’t do the kind of cheats they do on ordinary levels that everybody can use. You need rich code, and not too much traffic. 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 public commercial servers. Not unless you’re a child-molester or something.
“But our cheats need full hub access, if they want to fool around. And then, I suppose the best venues for fooling around and not getting caught, like the kayak channels, are the ones we like best, too.”
I told you: Dev sees things. It was obvious, the way he put it, and I felt stupid. Also depressed, wondering how we were ever going to be free of this nagging intrusion—
Then the black silhouette of another trekker appeared, alone and off to our left, on the other side of the dangerous icefield zone; the trap where you had to avoid ending up. 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 cheat costumes was white coveralls, with grease stains, and a NOSTROMO baseball cap, NOSTROMO being the name of the space freighter in the classic game and movie “Alien”. That’s what this guy was wearing, in the middle of this snowy wilderness. Dev took a look, and we grinned at each other.
“We have a deserter from the spaceship in Alien.”
We’d played Alien Trilogy Remastered. Maybe Dev had been too young, and the horror immersion too strong. Mom and Dad had put the Dev wakes up screaming, we find this antisocial, veto on it; to my regret. But he knew the story.
“Lost on this icy planet,” he went on. “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. And 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 had to argue Dev out of the heavy hardware. “You can’t cheat on the weight or you’ll lose fire power—”
“I won’t slow us down. I’ve got tons of strength.”
“Yes you will, and 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.”
I don’t like guns, I prefer a knife or a garrotte. “Because I want to feel something when I kill. That’s emotionally much healthier than—”
We were having this charming conversation, pulling up our weapons of choice, cutting across the ice zone to intersect with Nostromo’s path, and still looking for one more beautiful belly-glide, all at the same time. If we’d been concentrating, we’d have known there had to be a flaw somewhere, and we were liable to run into it. If we’d been believing in the game, like we should, we would never have been scooting along side by side on an icefield. That’s nuts. But we were distracted, and it just happened. There were cracking noises: a crevasse opened, and 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.
Θ
Black fade to grey, grey fade to blue. I sat up. I felt shaken and my head was ringing, but nothing was bleeding and no breakages. My Health was still okay, though. Dev was beside me, doing the same check.
We were not at the bottom of a crevasse. Our snowboards lay near us, looking supremely useless on a green, grassy field strewn with boulders. The sky was more violet than blue, suggesting high altitude. The sun had an egg-yolk, orangey tinge, the air had the clear heat you get in summer mountains. The peaks around the horizon, beautiful as anything I’d ever seen, seemed far higher than anything in Norwegian Blue.
“Where are we?” gasped Dev. He was looking sick; repairing the fall damage must have knocked more off his Health than it had off mine. I decided to pull up our emergency Medic—
“South America,” I guessed. “The Andes…? Or a fantasy world.”
“How are we going to get back?”
I thought that was a dumb question: then I realised I couldn’t get at the First Aid. I couldn’t get at anything in my cache. It was gone. I had the clothes I’d been wearing in Norwegian Blue, my knife, my garrotte and my vital signs Health patch. Nothing else—
“My God! They’ve wiped us!”
“Rebuild!” cried Dev, in a panic. “Rebuild! Quickly!”
But I couldn’t rebuild, and I couldn’t reach the code. Nor could Dev. The world looked solid, no glitches, no fuzzy bits. Nothing seemed to be wrong: but we were helpless. We stared at each other, outraged.
“This means war,” I said.
Θ
There wasn’t a doubt in our minds that the cheats had done this to us. Nostromo had seen us chasing him, swiftly pasted a crevasse in our path, 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 the way only the best hub code feels: intensely real. The whole boulder field seemed to be live, none of it just décor.
“They’re here somewhere,” I said. “They have to be.”
“They don’t have to be,” said Dev, unhappily. “They could have dumped us here helpless, and gone off laughing. Syl, where are we? I’ve never seen this place before, and I know all the adventure venues!”
I wished I had my Medic. My brother still wasn’t looking good. I was afraid he would log out on me, and then I’d have quit too.
“C’mon, Dev. Think about it. Nostromo lured us here, the way the pirate cheat lured us into the white water. It’s unfamiliar, but we didn’t know there was white water in the resort reed beds until we went through that flaw. These guys are good, maybe 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 stuff to do here, if we knew the game or if we had a guide. There’ll be exits, too. We’ll find one, get our stuff back, and get back on the bad guys’ trail.”
The orange sun moved towards its setting. We saw some little weasely sort of creatures, only with more legs, that watched us from a distance. We met huge golden furred spiders, the size of a cat, and 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 clustered ruby eyes. They liked being stroked, and scratched behind their front eyes. We thought about eating the
berries that grew on the crispy turf-stuff.
But we didn’t find the flaw, we didn’t recover our caches, and we didn’t find any gates back to the hub or hidden treasures that might have helped us out – 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 seemed like the southern end (in relation to that sunset) of the boulder field. They had a domed bivvy, thatched with lichen, and a fire a circle of stones. A bucket stood on a flat rock by the stream that ran near their hide-out. We were sick with envy. We felt as if we’d been wandering naked, unable to fix ourselves, 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 saying this is a real place, and refusing to log out, and I’m going into shock. White flag, surrender. Cry, if you can. Bring one over here, 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 reed beds, back at the resort, and I felt unsure. Had that been real? Usually adult gamers are normal, and harmless, but there are the rare predators, everyone knows that—
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 colour, and I could feel the growing chill through my “Norwegian Blue” snowboarding clothes. I clung to the wire looped over my gloved hands, thinking weirdly that the garrotte was part of me, a lifeline, and if it vanished I would be really trapped—
Dev came back up from the ravine, a cheat close behind. It was the Native American costumed-cheat, with a red and black blanket round his shoulders like a cloak. My brother looked very small and defenceless. Sometimes when a game seems very real it’s hard to kill, but I had no trouble at all this time. I jumped from behind, and my wire snapped viciously around the cheat’s throat… But someone had also grabbed me by the forearms, and I had to let go or they’d have broken my bones.
BIG CAT: And Other Stories Page 27
