by Deck Davis
“So, you’re going to the New Eden VBR without me,” I said.
“Yup,” answered Sera.
Vorm looked at the ground.
“Thanks for letting me know. There’s the door.”
As I watched Vorm shuffle and Sera stride out of my house, a sea of emotions crashed in my head, filling my skull with waves of anger, hurt, and sadness.
Team Wolfhound, the team I had started, had been taken away from me. Damn it, why had I let it be a democracy? Why had I given everyone access to the team command menu? All the bits I’d bet in Bernli were gone, and my avatar was so damaged that I couldn’t even use it.
The tide of emotions suddenly stilled, and they were replaced by one thought: If Sera and the others were going to the New Eden VBR, then I’d go, too. I’d join the solo leagues. Somehow, I’d find a way to enter New Eden without them.
Watching Sera drive her s-car away from my house, Mom’s words popped into my head. When you’re silent, you bottle a thunder inside. As much as I loved my dad, Mom was right about this one.
Chapter Seven
If I was going to work my way up the solo ladders and gain entry into the New Eden VBR, I needed a new avatar. There was no way around it. You see, not only was mine injured so badly that it’d take a chunk of bits to heal it, it was also team-locked. Yep, it was yet another money-spinner for the Overseer’s Commission. Once you registered your avatar to a team, you had to pay to unlock it if you ever left. Never mind that my team had stabbed a poison blade into my all-too-trusting back; it was still going to take over 10,000 bits to heal my avatar and then unlock it.
The only other option to paying bits was to wait eight months for the injuries to ‘naturally’ heal, and then a further four months for my team-lock to drop. So, I was looking at a year before I could use my Storm Knight. Since the first New Eden VBR trials were in forty days, I was out of luck.
I had only 1625 bits, so I was going to have to look into other means of getting a working avatar. A new avatar from an approved and licensed vendor would cost around 5000, even for one of a basic archer class. Avatars for more exotic classes cost a lot more. This was another option that I had to rule out.
The annoying thing was that Dad used to have avatars in his studio. Some were old and partially-leveled while others were barely used. After the accident, when I was left with the sole responsibility of the ranch, I’d had to sell them to pay off an outstanding loan Dad had taken out.
Having no other option, I was going to have to pay a visit to Black Gull Market.
After checking in with Dylan and making sure he’d be okay watching the ranch while I was gone, I rode my rental s-bike five miles into Duisben. From there, I caught an s-bus to the west coast.
When I first got on the bus, I sat adjacent to a brunette lady who was with her young son. Her boy kept banging on the window—tap, tap, tap—drawing a sharp glare from one of the other passengers. The mom made the boy sit up straight. Then she pointed at me.
“See that man?” she said. “If you don’t behave, he’s going to tell you off.”
That was pretty presumptuous of her. I looked her kid in the eye. He reminded me of a young version of Bill.
“Don’t worry, kid,” I said. “I’m not gonna tell you off. You keep doing what you’re doing. Sometimes you’ve gotta be a rebel.” That’s what I told myself. Gotta be a rebel. It was that thought that drove me to Black Gull, a place that didn’t sit well with me. Maybe I was kidding myself that I could just go there and get an avatar, but I had to try. There was no room for morals when you were in a situation like mine.
The bus had taken a winding route through a series of roads, dropping various passengers off at prot-layer-protected towns along the way. By the time we pulled up at a stop near a cliff that overlooked a beach, I was the last passenger.
“Next bus isn’t until tomorrow morning,” the driver said to me. “You sure you want to get off?”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’m going to—”
Too late. The driver had already lifted his palm in front of his face and had spread gel across it to create a digital display. He started playing a game featuring a frog trying to cross a busy s-bus lane.
As soon as I got off the bus, I tasted the sea. The salt was thick in the air, and it was almost as if I could feel it going into my lungs. The cliff I stood on overshadowed a beach below. The washed-out yellow sand bore no marks of sunbathers. I knew from history class that, way before prot-layers were a thing, people used to actually go out in the sun and lay in it, sometimes completely unprotected. It was madness. Now, the only things moving on the beach were a cast of black crabs that were scuttling away from the onrushing tide.
“Get your prot-coats. Five for fifty bits!” called a vendor who had set up a stall near the bus stop. It was a wooden stall with a small counter on which the vendor rested his hands. His skin was leathery like he’d been caught in the sun without a prot-coat or prot-gel.
I rubbed my own cheek and felt the rough skin next to my nose. I used to hate my scar. I used to think that it made me look freakish. Now, I loved it. Despite the circumstances of how I got it, it was a memory of Bill. It was kind of like having a table that was gnawed by a once-beloved and now deceased family dog. It annoyed you at the time when he chewed the table, but now when you looked at the wood bearing his teeth marks, you missed him.
There were two decent-sized towns—Isisile and Gurnova—and a collection of villages and hamlets all within biking distance of this section of the coastline. Not far away was a rack of s-bikes, though these weren’t in as good a condition as the ones in Bernli. Their frames were scratched and a little rusted, no doubt from constant exposure to the salty air.
A gale of wind howled in my ear. I zipped up my coat and made sure the hood was tight around my head. I put my hand in my pocket and felt the thin tube of prot-gel. Prot-gel was a cousin of the same gel used for displays screens, but with a key difference: Prot-gel protected you from the sun. In a pinch, if something happened to my hat and coat and there was no prot-layer nearby, I could smear the gel on my skin and clothes and have enough time to get to a town.
The creation of gel-tech had created an interesting divide in society. Given it was mined in a completely eco-friendly way as a raw material and then scientifically manufactured into something that could be used, people saw it differently. Some thought of it as an all-natural, honest-to-goodness product of the earth, put there by mother nature solely for our use. Others saw it as a cousin of the same raw materials we’d mined to exhaustion already, and they thought we’d soon do the same with gel. There were even people who worshipped it. They called it Amber of the Gods, and some of them died in suicide pacts by mixing it with arsenic and eating it.
I followed the cliff edge a half a mile. I passed the beach until there was nothing but sea below me. The waves pounded against the rocks. Out in the dark ocean, a lonely fishing boat battled against the waves.
I looked at each section of the cliff and tried to remember how long it had been since Dad brought me here. A decade? Nevertheless, I knew where I was going. After an hours’ walk, I found a familiar tangle of thorn bushes capping the cliff. I looked up at the clouds and saw that they were smothering the sky enough to block the sun. I took off my coat and spread it over the bush, before climbing over it. I was happy with myself for managing to complete the operation without suffering a single thorn sting.
Once I was over the bush, I saw the beginning of a path that twisted gently down the cliff. The rocks were slick with rain. With no rail to hold onto, it made for a hairy walk. More than once, a gale of wind shook me, but after years of having Bennie and the other wolfhounds leaping at me, I knew how to stay on my feet in the face of a sudden force. At the bottom of the path, fifty feet from the clifftop, I came to a mini-beach. This patch of sand was no larger than a living room. If you didn’t know it was here, it was doubtful you’d ever stumble upon it since the path that led here was a deathtrap. As unf
riendly a walk it was, it was necessary. The people of the Black Gull Market didn’t want just anyone stumbling their way down here.
In front of me was the raging sea, with its dark waters and frothy waves. Turning behind me, I saw a split in the cliffs. It was six feet wide, but it got wider the further in I went. As I approached it, I saw a lonely rowboat rocking in the water. Then, a man poked his face out from the cliff shadows. He was an Asian man with weathered skin, as though the unending salt winds had gouged lines in his face. When he waved at me, I saw that lines of digital text covered his palm. He must have spread gel on his skin and then downloaded a book to read while he waited for custom.
“Lost?” he asked me.
“I need to get to Black Gull.”
“Been here before?”
“Are you always this nosy?”
He sighed and stepped back into the shadows.
“I’ve been here before,” I said. The man didn’t come out. “And I have bits,” I added.
His face peered out of the shadows again. “You know the drill. Geo-locations off. No live feeds. The market has detectors, you know.”
I nodded. Secrecy was paramount in Black Gull. It wasn’t that everything here was stolen; some of the products on the market were just unsanctioned by the government, and that made them illegal.
I touched the mainnet connector on my wrist and brought up my holoface in front of me. All the way out here on the coast, the signal was awful. The blue display jerked and fizzed, but it stayed on long enough for me to turn off any sort of tracking or recording options.
“Hop in,” said the man, jumping down onto his boat. “Thirty bits.”
As soon as he started rowing us into the cliffs, the sound of the crashing tide faded. Everything was unnaturally silent, with the only sounds being the gentle turns of the boatman’s oars as he propelled us forward. The further in we went, the darker it got, and the brightness on my holoface auto-adjusted. I saw barnacles stuck to the damp cliff walls and dark fish swimming alongside the boat. It grew darker still, so much so that even with my brightness at max, it was hard to see. It was like the boatman was rowing us into a giant, gaping mouth. I gripped the sides of the rickety vessel. A memory shook me—one of coming here as a kid with Dad. I remembered the darkness worrying me, but Dad put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. He’d started to sing. Hello, darkness, my old friend… Then, his words had been snatched up by the silence, almost as if the interior cliff cavern ate the noise. I was older now, of course, and wiser, some might say. I’d seen much worse things and been in scarier than this in VBR. At least here, in real life, there were no translucent serpents.
As we went on, the darkness reached its peak. I began to wonder if the vendor had lost his way, even though it seemed that all he had to do was row straight. Then, light exploded in front of me. The cliff cavern opened to reveal the Black Gull Market in its entirety: a rainbow of neon lights, red signs saying ‘Bitz and Beerz,’ another pink sign advertising ‘Avatar Dreams.’ It was like a little island hidden deep inside the cliffs. It was a circular-shaped space, with the roof at least thirty feet above me. The market was crammed with ramshackle wooden buildings and market stalls. Some stalls had fabric hung above them to guard the sellers’ wares from the dew that dripped from the cavern roof. Customers milled around, some walking quickly toward particular stalls while others stopped at each vendor and browsed. I heard a hubbub of noises, of sellers trying to draw customers in by announcing their wares in sing-song voices, of customers shouting numbers at vendors in a vain attempt to drive their pieces down.
It was amazing. Standing on the clifftop, you’d never have imagined the amount of activity going on underneath your feet. Some of it was legit, of course, especially on the outer edges. They set it out this way so that if anyone came here accidentally (as improbable as that was), all they’d see would be a completely legal market that just happened to be inside a cliff. It was only deep in the heart of Black Gull that the under-the-counter goods were sold. That’s where I would need to go, because that’s where I’d find a particular store that my Dad used to visit.
As the boat came to a stop, the Asian rower held his wrist up.
“Fifty bits,” he said.
“You said thirty.”
“I said fifty.”
“No, you didn’t. Here, let me show you the feed…” And then I stopped. He’d made me turn off my feed, so nothing I’d seen or heard was recorded. It was all part of Black Gull rules. I smiled at him. Despite being conned, I always appreciated a man who looked for all the angles.
He moved his wrist toward me. I held my own arm up and pressed my mainnet socket against his.
Twenty-Five bits removed.
“Hey!” he said.
“You told me twenty-five.”
“I said fifty, you swine!”
“Then check your feed.”
He grinned. “Good luck when you need to be rowed outta here.”
This was an early lesson for me, one that I’d forgotten in the decade since Dad had first brought me here. Luckily it had happened now, and not when I came to make a big purchase. Trust nobody. That was the lesson.
As another customer approached and haggled with the rower, I left him behind and headed into the heart of Black Gull Market. I walked by several taverns, some full of uproarious laughter and clinking glasses, others empty except for morose patrons nursing drinks. A few times, semi-naked women and men catcalled me from behind curtained upper-floor windows of wooden huts, offering me all kinds of services. I liked a drink from time to time, but the squalor of Black Gull wasn’t really my thing. I was more of a take your dog for a walk and then watch TV kind of guy. I left the bars, brothels and gambling dens behind and walked into the center of Black Gull. I was looking for a specific stall, one Dad had brought me to.
I saw it. I hadn’t really believed that it’d be there, as it had been ten years since Dad had brought me, but there it was.
O’Reilly’s Avatars
I buy, I sell, I fix
It just went to show how little things really changed. When people got comfy, when they found a trade or profession that made enough bits to sustain them, they tended to stay with it. O’Reilly, it seemed, was an example of this. I pushed open the door and stepped into the shop. A bell tinkled above me, alerting O’Reilly to my presence. At the far end of the shop was a counter, but there was no sign of the guy who should have been working it. Beyond the counter was an open door that led to a hallway. At the end of it, hunched over a metal desk, was a bulky guy. He looked to be working on something. Maybe that was O’Reilly, and he was in his workshop.
He’d come when he was ready, I decided. I didn’t really need him staring at me while I browsed through his stuff anyway. Instead, I got to it. O’Reilly’s shop was filled with dozens of shelves. On each shelf, stacked with no attempt at order, were a bunch of avatars. Small, oval blocks of varying colors, each of them sized up to fit standard mainnet wrist connections.
Below each avatar, there was a barcode. When I held my wrist up to one, a holographic image of the avatar’s appearance was projected in front of me. With merely a thought, I could make the figure rotate to the left or right. Next to the image was a small text box that listed the avatar’s class, and skills, as well as its base HP, attack, and defense. I went through each avatar in turn. I saw hunters, barbarians, necromancers, red mages, black mages, warriors. It seemed like O’Reilly had an avatar to suit every class. The best part? They were available for a fraction of the cost of a brand-new avatar. Thankfully, it seemed like my measly 1625 bits would buy me almost any one that I wanted.
As always, though, when something seemed too good to be true, it probably was. Avatars didn’t grow on trees, and the industrial companies that produced them were heavily regulated. For O’Reilly to have so many at such a low price meant something was fishy. If I had to guess, I would have said that 90% of O’Reilly’s avatars were stolen. I wasn’t here to profit from the victim of a
crime. It was true that, sometimes, you had to be a rebel, but my rebellion extended to buying non-sanctioned goods, not to straight-up stealing.
I approached the counter. O’Reilly was still in his workshop down the hallway, absorbed in whatever he was doing. No doubt, he was up to something dodgy; maybe he was working on a recently-acquired avatar to de-register its previous owner.
“Hey,” I said. No answer. I looked around for a bell or something to get his attention, but there wasn’t one. It seemed that in his shop, O’Reilly came to the counter when he was good and ready. I banged on the counter. “Police raid! O’Reilly, I have a warrant to search your shop.”
O’Reilly’s posture straightened so quickly it was like someone had held a burning poker against his ass. He swiveled around in his seat and peered at me from the end of the hallway. Then he stood up and approached. He was such a bulky guy that the thud of his boots seemed to shake the whole shop. Behind me, a couple of avatars rattled on the shelf.
