by L. E. Price
“To that end,” said the sorcerer with the widow’s peak, “might we boldly suggest a change of venue? Our personal airship, the Defiant, is docked a quarter-mile north of here. We’re setting sail for Vangelis, and we’d love to have you accompany us.”
The teenager spun like a ballerina and flung her hands high in the air. It rained money. Copper coins, flung by the fistful, scattered across the tavern. Players dove after the surprise gift, scrabbling to scoop the cash up off the ale-sticky floor.
“And the drinks are on us,” she cheered. “C’mon, everybody, let’s party!”
As the room went up in whoops and applause, Jake leaned back and crossed his arms.
“See what I mean?” Woody jabbed him with his elbow. “Rock stars. Everybody loves these guys.”
The Elect led their very own parade, people clambering over the dead bodies of the Lollers to follow them out into the warm night air. An awkward but enthusiastic conga line was starting up, and the minotaur gave a genial grumble as he was drafted to lead the procession.
Jake wasn’t buying it. He couldn’t shake the instant, visceral dislike he felt for the four celebrity-adventurers. Of course, first impressions meant a lot, and he knew he could probably chalk that up to his run-in with Ichiro.
Still. Something about him and his crew felt shady to the core. Reading people, getting past their facades to the real meat underneath, was part of Jake’s job — and the Elect read all wrong. He shrugged it off. None of his business anyway, and nothing to do with his case. He pointed to the viscera and mangled robes scattered across the tavern floor.
“So this is what the Lollers do for fun?”
Woody rubbed the back of his neck and winced. “They’re trolls. Their idea of fun is ruining other people’s fun. It’s pretty much the only thing they have in common. They’ve been at it for weeks now, and practically every guild in the game, even the ones who never take sides, are united against them. Which, unfortunately, is exactly what the Lollers want; they love being hated. Rumor is, the other gods had a council meeting. They’re getting ready to put aside their differences and go after Roofle Mao hardcore. If they can kill him, it’ll deny the Lollers a ton of special powers and make it harder for them to cause trouble. Everybody’s hoping they’ll get bored and go away after that.”
“I don’t get it,” Jake said. “SDS knows about this, right? So why aren’t the gamemasters doing something about it?”
“The Lollers pay their subscription fees like everybody else.”
“But they’re trying to ruin the game. If I ran a restaurant, and somebody came in and started pissing on the tables, it wouldn’t matter if he paid his bill or not — I’d boot his ass out before he drove all my other customers away.”
“SDS won’t comment,” Woody sighed. “Most people think it’s a social experiment. They want to see how the players handle it on their own — if the players can handle it — before they step in.”
“Ought to track ‘em down in the real world,” Jake said. “Some people just need a good smack upside the head. Quickest way to sort somebody out.”
Woody gave him a sidelong glance. “You are a violent man, Jacius of Cam’s Den.”
“I like to think of myself as practical above all else.”
Woody pushed himself away from the wall. They had most of the tavern to themselves now, the sounds of raucous cheering drifting out into the night. A barmaid went from table to table, wiping down the wood with a worn cloth, while the bartender stood in mechanical silence. Jake watched as the barmaid stepped onto the corpse of a dead Loller, navigating his gutted torso like it was just part of the scenery, and he realized she was an NPC. The simulation of human life was so uncanny, he only noticed by her utter lack of reaction to the carnage.
“You coming?” Woody asked. “I’ve been on the Defiant a couple of times. Always a great party.”
“I’m going to call it a night. I want to get an early start tomorrow and try to track down some of Trevor’s real-life friends. I need to find out what this kid was into, get some insight into who he is when he’s not logged in.”
“Suit yourself.” Woody pointed at his left eye. “I’m going to get to work, then. An Elect party always gets me some great footage for the feed.”
Jake frowned at him. “You’re not recording right now, are you?”
“Every second of every day, my man. Don’t worry, your cheerful face isn’t going to make an appearance on my channel, I know how you’re all super-undercover. That said, under the circumstances, having a record of what went down might be handy later on. I could edit the footage into one bad-ass documentary. That is, assuming SDS doesn’t keep the story locked under a non-disclosure agreement for the next two hundred years.”
“Count on it,” Jake told him.
Woody ran off to join the conga line, and Jake stood alone. The NPC barmaid flashed him a smile as she skirted past him, wiping the same table down once again. A bit of spilled ale vanished under her rag. By the time she reached the end of the table, it had already reappeared, ready to be mopped up once more. And a hundred times more, and forever.
Jake didn’t log out right away. He took a long walk, breathing the night air, staring up at the shimmering curtain of stars. It was past eleven when he disconnected, and the whisper of a cool breeze gave way to the rumble of distant thunder outside the dusty blinds of his office windows.
He unhooked the game-deck’s cable, stood up, stretched, and ambled over to his desk. Then he uncapped his pen and gave the meat of his arm a good jab. A second ink-dot joined the first, twin reminders of what pain felt like. Pain and reality.
12.
The next morning, Jake stood under the limp, lukewarm stream from his shower head and rubbed powdered shampoo through his hair. A storm raged outside, hammering the old building, making the lime-caked shower tiles vibrate. The pipes rattled and shook. A few stray droplets squeezed out from under layer upon crusted layer of yellowed plumbers’ tape. Like always, he used the morning routine to plan his day. He liked to have a full schedule by the time his coffee was ready; indecision just wasted time.
He drank his coffee down, black and bitter, while he patched a call through to Gordon Kensington’s office. Gordon’s assistant was brusque, the type who could usually be counted on to give Jake the runaround or at least keep him sitting on hold, but one mention of his name and she pulled her boss out of a meeting.
“Tell me you have something.” Gordon phrased it like an order, but the tone of his voice was saying please.
“Still getting my feet wet. I need to poke into Trevor’s offline contacts. Does he have a school-issued tablet? I’d like to take a look at it.”
Jake caught the edge of a laugh in Gordon’s voice. Not consciously cruel, but the reflexive snicker of a city slicker meeting a backwoods bumpkin.
“A tablet? No, that’s…Trevor’s academy has evolved a little beyond tablets; all the students are provided with full-immersion rigs as part of the tuition cost. Not like a game deck, exactly — they’re heavily regulated, intended just for homework and tailored to the curriculum.”
Intended was the word there. Back when Jake had been in school, the student tablets were locked down for all of three seconds before some enterprising junior hackers cracked them wide open. Those were “just for schoolwork” too, but they’d been used for everything from under-the-radar social media to illegal file-sharing. Teenagers found a way.
“Even better,” Jake said.
Gordon sent the limo to pick him up. The Lincoln Reeve sat curbside in the downpour, long black fins piercing the billowing yellow smog like twin knives. It was a three-second run from the front door of his building to the car’s back seat, but Jake didn’t take chances: he looked like a mutant bug as he burst through the curtain of rotten-egg rain, bundled tight under his bulky overcoat, rebreather and goggles. His thick-soled boots splashed through a puddle on the broken concrete.
He threw himself into the back seat and hauled
the door shut. The roar of the storm became a faint whisper. Droplets rolled off the waxy, treated surface of his coat and onto the leather seats, hissing like peroxide on an open wound.
“Sorry about the upholstery,” he said.
The chauffeur shot him a look in the rearview mirror, one that told him exactly how much he was worth compared to the car. Then they were off, gliding though the smog and rain toward the golden pyramid of the Barrymore Arcology. He was mostly dry by the time they arrived, but mostly wasn’t good enough: security walked him to a storage room off the service entrance and assigned him a battered locker to store his gear in.
“Coat check and everything,” Jake said as he stashed his goggles on a dented metal shelf. “Do I get a receipt?”
The security guard stared at him, dead-eyed, voice flat. “Nobody’s going to steal your shit.”
“Can’t be too careful these days.”
His escort walked him down a long corridor, glass on both sides and up on top, reinforced with X-shaped struts of white steel. No storm, no smog — the world on the other side was a bright, shiny day looking out at a healthy and clean city. Neat trick, Jake thought. High-definition video screens designed to look like windows. Making him store his outsider gear wasn’t just to keep the acid rain off the mirror-polished tiles; these people didn’t want any hint of the outside world, the real world, invading their habitat. Inside Barrymore, every day was the first day of Spring. The elevator hummed softly as it whisked Jake up to the hundred and twenty-seventh floor.
Gordon was still at work; the Kensingtons’ housekeeper, a tight-lipped and beady-eyed woman who didn’t feel like sharing her name, met him at the door. She walked him to Trevor’s room. Then she found some cleaning to do in the hallway outside, bumping around just loud enough to let Jake know she was keeping an eye on him.
Jake took a long look at Trevor, comatose on his bed, plugged in and lost somewhere in fantasy-land while his body survived on an IV drip. The hospital monitor at his side let out steady metronome beeps, keeping watch over his body until his mind came home.
Until I bring him home, Jake thought. Trevor’s school-issued deck sat on the edge of his dresser. It was fatter than the game deck, powder-blue and bulbous like it had been designed to be as visually unappealing as possible. He left it alone for the moment and rifled through the dresser drawers. Jake’s practiced fingers slid along the underbellies of the drawers and beneath Trevor’s rolled-up socks, checking all the usual hiding places for notes, clues, contraband. He wasn’t surprised to come up empty. Trevor’s generation lived on Grid 2.0; only natural that’s where they’d keep their secrets, too.
He pulled up a chair and tugged over the deck. This model had its own built-in connection cable, spooling out from the back of the plastic shell. The magnetic jack latched onto the disk of Jake’s implant with a hollow click. He got comfortable, took a few deep breaths, and tapped the big blue connect button.
Trevor’s bedroom slid out of sight, stretching as it pulled away and Jake’s vision slipped into darkness. Instead of the grassy fields and bright skies of Paradise Clash, he found himself floating bodiless above a wire-frame grid of violet light. Words swam before him, stark and cheerless: This system is assigned to Student 39546, Barrymore Arcology Academy 3. This system is provided courtesy of the Westinghouse Educational Corporation and is to be used only according to the rules and regulations referenced in your Welcoming Agreement. User must agree in order to continue.
“I agree,” Jake said. He had just enough time to worry that the system was voice-printed, keyed for Trevor’s access alone, before the system let him in. Either security wasn’t a top priority for these people, or they just didn’t want to spend that much money.
All content created while operating this system is hereby understood to become the full intellectual property of Westinghouse Educational Corporation. User must agree in order to continue.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jake muttered.
The words hung frozen before him. They weren’t kidding. He voiced his agreement while flipping an invisible middle finger.
The system gave him a body, more or less. He’d gotten accustomed to the hyper-realistic avatars of Paradise Clash. Now he was a blue outline of a human being, sexless and faceless, like a person sculpted out of garish clay. He stood in a crudely-sculpted hallway, some graphic designer’s first paid gig, modeled to look like a Norman Rockwell dream of a vintage American school. Tall lockers lined the wide corridor’s walls, under draping scarlet banners with “Go Thunderbolts!” written out in big block letters. A candy dish of fellow students swirled all around him, all as anonymous as he was but some in green, some in yellow, some in strawberry pink. He wasn’t sure if they were color-sorted by grade, or if the color of their blob-person avatar was a tiny nod to customization, the only thing the students were allowed to choose for themselves.
The simulation’s designers had skimped on graphics, but they’d cut sound out of the budget altogether. The students milled in complete silence, not even the echo of footsteps to suggest this was anything but a school of phantoms.
Jake’s borrowed avatar came with a few extras. A disembodied keyboard floated in front of him, moving along with him as he turned from side to side. To his left, a virtual bookbag — a cube, open on one side, with a mismatched fabric texture slapped onto it — held electronic copies of his schoolbooks. Algebra, English, American history — all the usual suspects. To his right, at eye level, text scrolled across the face of a transparent window.
Welcome Kensington, Trevor, 39546, it read. You have (12) assignments overdue. You have (16) pending assignments. You have a message from school administration marked (urgent).
“He’s got bigger problems right now,” Jake muttered. The window had a few extra tabs on top. Jake poked one with the tip of his blobby blue finger. It was Trevor’s personal in-box, flooded with texts from his buddies. Everyone wanted to know where he was, where he’d been; from the context, Jake gathered that Trevor’s parents were calling him in sick but they hadn’t passed along any details. He read the texts one by one, careful and slow, looking for anybody who seemed to know more than they should.
The window flickered, jerking out from under his fingertips. A new message flashed: Voice connection request from Student Miller, Timothy, 39448. Accept? Reminder: all communications are logged and may be monitored by school administration.
Voice. He could pretend to be Trevor, as long as he was safe behind this faceless avatar, but Jake couldn’t fake the kid’s voice. Honesty wasn’t an option, either: SDS wanted this entire situation kept under wraps, and his paycheck was depending on it. Disconnecting from the system now, without taking the call, could open a can of worms all its own.
Jake thought fast. This entire system felt bargain-basement compared to Paradise Clash, but it was designed around a school’s basic needs. That included support for hearing-impaired students. He looked at the keyboard floating in front of him.
“Options,” Jake said, thinking fast. Nothing changed. The window flashed again, impatient. “Voice options. Call options. Assistance options.”
That worked. A fresh batch of text scrolled onto the screen, letting him know he could connect with voice or opt for keyboard-assisted communication. He picked the latter. A voice, high-pitched and excited, babbled in his inner ear. Every word he spoke flashed up on the window, transcribed by software in real time.
“Trevor! Dude, you’re back! Are you back? Where have you been?”
The voice sounded familiar, too familiar, and Jake tried to place it while his fingers rattled on the virtual keyboard. The keys were doughy, too soft, under his fingertips; even that basic level of simulation was too much for the designers to bother getting right.
“Still out,” he typed. “Just logged on to pick up my homework, then I have to go back to bed.”
“That sucks. Why aren’t you using voice chat?”
Jake was making up his story on the fly. “Lary
ngitis. Hurts like a mother—”
He hadn’t even finished the line when the window flashed red. Profanity Detected, it warned, and erased what he’d just typed. He tried again.
“Laryngitis. Can’t talk, can barely swallow. Been living on chicken broth and juice for days.”
“Oh, man,” Tim said, “that’s the worst. I stopped by your place a couple of days ago to see you, but whats-her-name, your housekeeper, wouldn’t let me past the front door and she wouldn’t tell me anything, just that you were sick. Have to say, she’s kind of a—”
The last word was obliterated under a mechanical beep as the automatic censor stepped in a second time. That was fine; he’d talked just long enough for Jake to place his voice. Timothy Miller was Rolen the Blue, one of the two dragon hunters he’d encountered just last night. Knowing that, his next question didn’t surprise Jake one bit.
“So, wanted to ask you something. Me and Mag ran into a guy last night, some newbie we’ve never seen before, going by Jacius? Anyway, he was looking for you. He said you know him offline; that so?”
Jake had gotten away with one lie so far, posing as the person he was hunting for. Now, to figure out what these people were up to, he was going to have to pull off a harder one: he needed to pose as Trevor and vouch for himself.
13.
“Jacius is cool,” Jake typed. “I know him, yeah. We’re not best friends or anything, but I trust him.”
“Considering I’m your best friend, last time I checked, I sure hope you aren’t. I like to know when I’m being replaced.”
Jake’s jaw tightened. On one hand, he wanted to find somebody close to Trevor, somebody who knew his life on a level that the authority figures in his life — his parents, his teachers — didn’t have access to. On the other hand, one slip in his story and Tim would catch it in a heartbeat.
