by L. E. Price
“Substantial?” Jake said.
“Substantial. You would, of course, have to sign a non-disclosure agreement vowing that you will never reveal any of this to the media, under threat of severe legal penalty. My employers can’t afford for this to become a scandal. Frankly, the entire industry can’t afford it. You would have our gratitude.”
All eyes were on Jake, and an expectant silence fell over the room. Silent, but for the beeping of the hospital machines at Trevor’s bedside.
Jake had never even tried a full-immersion sim, let alone plied his trade inside of one. But a virtual-reality environment was just that: an environment, no different from a strange neighborhood or a corner bar. He could make it work. And with serious money on the line — not to mention the thanks of some influential people, and the potential for future business — he didn’t see any way to say no.
“I can start first thing in the morning,” Jake said. “Now let’s talk about my fee.”
* * * *
Woody took him at his word. The next morning, while Jake was still in his undershirt and brewing a pot of coffee, he heard his office door rattling under a steady knock. The professional gamer was out in the hall, looking as tired as Jake felt and toting a heavy plastic case in each hand. Jake looked past his shoulder, up the empty corridor.
“Figured an arcology guy wouldn’t come to the east side without an armed escort.”
“Wasn’t an ‘arcology guy’ until a few years ago when my career took off. Spent most of my life five blocks from here.”
“No kidding.” Jake waved him in. “Coffee?”
Woody trundled over to Jake’s desk. He sat the twin cases down, their military-olive drab shells gleaming, on top of a pile of unpaid bills.
“Never on a workday, thanks.” Woody rapped a finger against his forehead. “Caffeine puts the jitters into my synaptic response. Usually not a big deal, but if you’re playing something that calls for blistering-fast reaction times, like Golden Temple for instance, victory comes down to milliseconds. And right now most of my streaming revenue comes from Golden Temple, so there you go.”
“Explain that one. People actually subscribe to your feed, just to watch you play games? Games they could play themselves.”
“Not at my level,” Woody said. “I mean, not to brag, but this is what I do for a living. Say you want to get into some hot new game, but you want practical tutorials to start off right, so you don’t look totally clueless your first time out. My feed’s got you covered. Or maybe you’re already a good player but you want to go pro. Not only do I interview the top e-sports players in the field, I’ve got hours of play-by-play, breaking down how they do what they do. There’s other reasons people tune in, too. In the case of Paradise Clash, a lot of my subscribers want to watch some good RP sessions.”
Jake felt like a lost child in the woods. His coffeemaker chimed. He poured himself a mug as Woody opened the plastic cases. A clutter of gear piled up on his desk, piece by piece: a pair of game decks, lengths of silver-jacketed coaxial cable, and an official-looking plug-in dongle sheathed in black mylar wrap. A silver stamp on the mylar read SDS Property / Official Use Only.
“RP?” Jake asked. He raised the steaming mug to his lips. The first swallow of black coffee, bitter and strong, slammed a steel-toed boot into his brain.
“Roleplay. Basically, speaking and acting like your game character would. It’s like…comedy improv, but more drama and storytelling than comedy. Paradise Clash is pretty much the game for dedicated roleplayers right now, and I know where all the RP hotspots are and who to follow to get the best footage.”
“Is Trevor a roleplayer?”
“Eighty-seven percent of Clashers identify that way, to one degree or another. His 360Stream account shows that he watched — watches, sorry — my RP footage pretty religiously, so at least he’s interested.”
Jake caught the slip. Trevor’s father had done the same thing, talking about him in past tense. It was like a barometer for hope. Experience had given Jake a hard and fast rule: always talk about a missing kid like they’re still alive and kicking. Always present tense, until they’re either home safe and sound or a body turns up.
Woody picked up the black-wrapped dongle and showed it to him. “Little gift from SDS for you. Once we set up your Clash account, I can upgrade you to gamemaster status. Gamemasters go in-world to sort out customer service issues and deal with disruptions. Basically, you’ll be immortal, all-powerful, maxed out in every skill, teleport across the game-world in a heartbeat—”
“And nobody will be able to tell?”
Woody’s lips curled into a smirk, like Jake had asked if a football player could hit a home run.
“Dude, everybody will be able to tell. GMs have big honking halos and glow like a nuke. Standard practice for every full-immersion sim, not just Paradise Clash. Also, everything a GM does is recorded and filed with SDS and with a liaison from the Grid Regulatory Authority. It’s the law.”
Jake’s brow furrowed. “Why’s that?”
“Money.” Woody rubbed his thumb against his fingertips. “The Enhanced Gaming Act of 2067 opened the door to sports books getting in on the action. You can walk into any Vegas casino and bet your chips on who’s going to win in the next World Brawl Heroes championship or the Golden Temple semifinals.”
“So, if people found out an employee who could decide the outcome of a game was walking around invisible…” Jake said.
“You get it. No more consumer trust. And boom, a whole sub-economy crashes overnight. Gamemaster accounts have to be loudly and visibly flagged, every last sneeze is recorded, and auditors from the GRA make regular, unannounced checks to make sure the overview code hasn’t been messed with. And game company employees, right down to the guys who make lunch in the SDS cafeteria, can’t get within a mile of the gambling action. Legally it’s tantamount to insider trading.”
Jake pointed to the mylar-wrapped gadget. “Won’t be needing that.”
“Wait.” Woody stared at him. “Why not? This is the key to the entire kingdom. You can go anywhere, do anything—”
“With a big neon sign attached to me like a bullseye. See, there’s a couple of problems here. Number one, you said these ‘gamemasters’ deal with disruptions. They enforce the rules, right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So, they’re cops.” Jake sipped his coffee. “Nobody wants to talk to the cops. I can get more traction and move more freely if people think I’m just another player. Second issue is that ‘everything is recorded’ business. Between you and me, we can agree this isn’t some kind of miracle glitch, right?”
A twist of cable turned in Woody’s fingertips. He toyed with it, anxious and absent, like a good-luck charm. “No chance. Between the protective mechanisms in Trevor’s deck all going offline, along with the game’s internal fail-safes, and the Clash server losing track of him at the same time, that’s like…you’d have better odds winning the lottery three times in a row while being struck by lightning.”
“Exactly. So that leaves two possibilities. Either Trevor did this himself, or somebody did it to him. Somebody with inside, high-level access at SDS. An employee. Now, they’ve got to figure his family is sending someone to track Trevor down. I can’t help that, but I don’t have to make myself any easier to spy on, either.”
The twist of cable plugged into one of the twin game-decks with a hollow snap. Woody held up the other end, tipped with a magnetic clamp.
“Okay,” he said. “This is going to be a heck of a lot harder, going in like a real newbie, but I can’t argue with your reasons. So…ready to have your mind blown?”
4.
Jake floated in darkness. It engulfed him like a pool of warm water, churning around him in black currents and caressing his invisible skin.
He knew this wasn’t real. He knew his body was stretched out on the fold-out couch in his shabby office in Philadelphia with a game-deck cable clamped to the implant just behind his ear.
All the same, he couldn’t feel the scratchy fabric or the kink in the cable where it curled against his left shoulder, or the faint ache in his back he’d woken up with that morning. Just the warm, welcoming dark. It was like the edge of a good night’s sleep, hovering on the brink of a dream.
“Earth to Jake, come in Jake.”
Woody’s voice echoed from nowhere and everywhere.
“Is this working right?” Jake asked — thought — in Woody’s general direction. “I’m in the dark. Literally.”
“Yeah, I wanted to run some basic diagnostics, since you’ve never done full-immersion before. I’m piggybacking off your feed. Good news is, all lights are green. I’m getting some mild electrical glitches, you really ought to get your implant checked, but it’s nothing critical. Bad news is, you should also get a physical. Your blood pressure is not in a happy place.”
“Said you used to live on the east side like me,” Jake replied. “How many healthy meals did you get, growing up?”
“True, true. It’s that packaged ramen, man. So yummy, but those flavor packets are pure sodium. Anyway, brace yourself, connecting to the character creation suite.”
In darkness, there was light. In the distance, slow and soft at first, then blossoming. Jake felt his formless body sliding toward it, pulled like a magnet.
He felt warm flagstone under his invisible feet. He curled his toes, flesh against rough, firm rock. The light became a host of torches all around him, guttering smoke as they burned in wrought-iron sconces. Their shifting light cast long shadows along walls formed from heavy sandstone blocks. Open archways marked the round chamber at even intervals, eight in all. A shadow loomed from one of the openings.
The shadow stepped forth and became a woman. Her features delicate, body shrouded in a hood and ivory white robe. The robe’s long hem dragged along the flagstones like a bridal train. Her eyes, impossibly blue, fixed upon Jake. She clasped her pale hands in salute.
“Welcome, good traveler, to the Temple of Making. I am the resident priestess, Cybele. This is where you will begin your journey into the world of Paradise Clash…and, if fate decrees, rise up to become a figure of legend. Are you prepared?”
Woody’s voice crackled in Jake’s ear. “Okay, this is an NPC. Non-player character, basically a puppet controlled by the game code. They’re programmed to listen for phrases they understand, so you can talk to ‘em like a real person. Well, more or less. Give it a shot.”
Jake stared at Cybele, longer than he ever would have stared at a real woman. She stood and smiled, patiently waiting for his response. He walked a slow circuit around her.
“You sure she isn’t a real person?” he whispered.
He wasn’t sure what he expected, the moment the game-deck whirred to life and plunged him into darkness. Full immersion. He understood it in concept, sure. The deck piped code to his implant, plugging it straight into his brain stem and overriding his nervous system with a custom-tailored hallucination. Simple to understand. But ‘hallucination’ still implied something less than real, hazy, dream-like.
He felt the rigid, rough stone under the bare soles of his feet. He smelled the smoke from the torches, woody and tangy, and felt it tickle the back of his throat. He stood facing a woman who looked every bit as three-dimensional and real as he did. More than he did, seeing as his own body was a shadow, a ghost.
Woody snickered. “Aw, man, nothing like your first time. Welcome to full immersion. Go on, answer her.”
“Uh, yeah. Yes.” Jake looked to Cybele. “I’m ready.”
The tiny bow of her lips curled and she clapped her hands. “Excellent. Please, accompany me, and we will find a form worthy of your ambitions.”
He followed behind her, careful not to step on the train of her robe as she led the way to one of the torch-flanked arches. Curious, he tossed a question at her.
“What’s two plus two?”
She glanced back over her shoulder and gave him a faint chuckle. “Do you seek to test me, sir? Even a beggar could tell you that. The answer is four.”
“Who won the Super Bowl this year?”
Her eyebrows knitted for a moment, and she waved an idle hand as she led him down a vaulted corridor.
“Superb…bowl? I’m afraid I know of no such contest, but I have few visitors here, and news of the world is hard to come by. The only bowl I possess is a soup tureen of simple wood. It meets my needs most adequately. That said, I wouldn’t say no to the gift of a superb one. Made of gold, perhaps, and embedded with rubies? I’d feel like a queen, as I ate my morning porridge.” She glanced back at him, wearing a mischievous little smile. “Don’t tell the high priestess I said that. She constantly reminds me that humility is a virtue.”
He pushed against his own instincts. Everything he was seeing and hearing told him that this woman was real, not a computer-driven piece of code. Normally he would never do this, but he reached out with his shadowy forefinger and gave her shoulder a tiny poke. He felt the coarse weave of her robe and the soft skin beneath.
Her smile vanished. “I’ll thank you to keep your hands to yourself, sir.”
“Sorry.” Jake winced. “Won’t happen again.”
She seemed to accept his apology. They emerged into another room of stone, this one set up like a salon, or a small cabaret. Comfortable chairs flanked small, round tables, cast in the glow of tea-lights that flickered inside globes of spun glass. The chairs faced a low stage.
There were bodies on the stage. Not dead, but sleeping, or cast in some kind of suspended animation. They stood dressed in skimpy ash-gray underclothes, putting their physiques on display. Some were human, with chiseled muscles or supermodel curves, the kind of bodies you could only get with perfect genetics and a dedicated trainer at the gym. Others had pointed ears, curling rams’ horns, skin in wild colors or coated in reptilian scales.
“Here,” Cybele explained, “you will choose an avatar for your journey. Feel free to take your time and explore. I can answer any questions you might have.”
Woody’s voice cut in. “Okay, as you might have guessed, here’s where you stop playing as Casper the Friendly Ghost and get a real body. Well, virtually real. As of the 13.8 patch, there are eight main races, and twelve sub-races based on regional variants. Mostly it’s a roleplaying choice, but each race does have a small, unique skill bonus based on their culture.”
Jake figured he could understand the appeal. Paradise Clash offered the chance to be anyone you wanted to be, to wear the body you always wanted but reality denied you. For his purposes, though, the choice was a simple one. He turned his face from Cybele and dropped his voice low.
“What’s the most popular option?”
“Human,” Woody said. “Boring, if you ask me, but thirty-eight percent of the player base rolls human.”
“That’s my pick, then.”
“Maybe go minotaur?” Woody suggested. “They’ve got muscles on muscles and stomp major ass. Or how about a dusk elf? They can manipulate fairy-fire, without even spending any skill points. It’s not super useful, but it’s a lot of fun.”
Jake had to smile at Woody’s enthusiasm. “Remember what you said back at the Kensingtons’ place? How you’d handle the gamer stuff if I handled the private-investigator stuff?”
“Yeah?”
“This is private-investigator stuff,” Jake said. “Doesn’t matter how open-minded or progressive you are: by and large, in my experience, people are most comfortable opening up to people who look like they do. The more I blend in and look just like everybody else, the easier this job will be. I do the same thing in the real world with my wardrobe. If I’m going down-market to look for answers, I wear worn-out denim and boots. If I’m going up-market, I wear a three-piece suit.”
“You didn’t wear a suit last night.”
“Nope. That’s marketing. When arcology people hire a guy from Outside to take care of their business, they want to see that rough edge on display. They want somebody who talks like a p
rofessional but looks a little dangerous. So that’s what I give them.”
“Getting you acclimated to the game is going to be easier than I thought,” Woody told him.
“Yeah? How’s that?”
“You’re halfway to being a roleplayer already.”
Jake turned at the sound of a soft, polite cough. Cybele stood at his shoulder.
“If you’re uncertain,” Cybele said, “I can offer suggestions based on the activities you enjoy and what you hope to accomplish once you enter the world.”
“Let’s go with human,” Jake replied. “I like to stick with the classics.”
“Very good. Male or female?”
That knocked him off-balance for a second. It hadn’t even occurred to him that he could choose. Then again, in a world where you could have wings or a dragon’s tail, not including a gender option would be weird. He had to admit he was curious. All the same, he wasn’t there to experiment. He had a job to do, and that meant taking the most direct approach.
“Male,” he said.
The priestess led him to the stage. The gathered bodies rippled and vanished like heat mirages on a desert highway. Only one remained: a man with broad shoulders, a lantern jaw and a strong brow-line, stubble on his cheeks and his dark hair combed to the side.
“It’s…me,” Jake said. “Sort of.”
The sleeping body could have been his brother, or maybe a close cousin. His complexion was cleaner than Jake’s, unmarred by decades of bad air and acid rain. His muscles were toned in a gym, while Jake got his physique from an amateur boxing ring, push-ups on his office floor, and back-alley scuffles. The double didn’t have any scars. When Jake thought about his own, though, a long sliver of white blossomed on the sleeping figure’s chest, stretching down in a fish-belly arc from his collarbone.
“This is some cool shit,” Woody said in his ear. “The game bases the avatar on your own self-perception. You can’t imagine how complicated the code is, took years and about seventy million dollars just to get this feature into beta. Now, nobody remembers exactly what they look like — even artists use a mirror to paint self-portraits — so it’s never a hundred percent accurate. The idea is to give you a comfortable base to work from, to prevent bodily dysphoria.”
