Day 9

by Robert T. Jeschonek

  Only one of the crowd wasn't dressed like a Willow—a young man in a sleek black suit with a red necktie. He charged through the door and sprang up onto the reception desk, spreading his arms wide.

  "Hey now, heroes!" he said, and the mob said it, too—one of Willows' famous catch phrases. "What're we fightin' for?"

  "Love and justice!" said the crowd.

  "Darn tootin'!" The man on the desk grinned down at Hannahlee. "We have genuine royalty among us today, gang! How does Sensophile welcome the original Kitty Willow, Lianna Caprice?"

  "Group hug!" The ersatz Willows threw their arms around their guests and each other and squeezed.

  The man on the desk clapped. "And we have another luminary with us, too! None other than the man who's written 43 Willows novels...and who's writing the brand new big screen Weeping Willows movie! Dunne Sullivan!"

  All the Willows gasped at once. This time, Dunne got an extra-long squeeze from a beautiful girl during the group hug.

  His heart pounded, and his body felt light. For once, he felt like someone special. Like a star.

  And it was awesome.

  "Now let's get to work, folks!" The man on the table blew a tune on his kazoo. "We have to help our honored guests track down Cyrus Gowdy himself."

  The crowd cheered and applauded as if Gowdy had just appeared in the flesh. Then, they poured back through the door out of the lobby, sweeping Hannahlee, Dunne, and Quincy along with them.

  "What the hell's a 'slashfic filker?'" said the man in the black suit and red tie as he led Dunne and the others through the office suite.

  "You know," said Quincy. "I sing about crazy sex pairings, like Bella Willow and Archie Bunker. And I specialize in Weeping Willows slashficfilk."

  "Riiight." Black suit man nodded and winked. "Well, good luck with that." Then, he turned his attention back to Hannahlee.

  Quincy slumped. "But culture-wise, it's the next big viral breakout."

  Dunne patted his shoulder. "We know, Quincy. It's all good."

  "Can't freason with a philistine, I guess." Quincy shrugged and sighed. "I wish I'd brought my dulcimer. I'd really show him."

  Quincy kept mumbling, but Dunne stopped listening. He was much more interested in what black suit man was saying.

  "My name's Todd Myriada, by the way." Black suit man gave Hannahlee a little bow as they walked. "President and CEO of Sensophile. I'm a very hands-on kind of guy." He flickered his fingers over his face and laughed.

  Dunne looked around at the suite as he followed Todd and Hannahlee. It was a vast, wide-open space, free of cubicles or any typical workplace furniture...even desks. The employees, still costumed like Willows, sat in bean bags on the floor or lay in hammocks hung from the ceiling, tapping away at laptops and handheld computers. All sorts of toys and snacks were scattered around—foam rubber footballs and giant bags of Doritos. People filled cups of soda from taps on the wall and watered the jungle of green plants growing over and around all the windows.

  Dunne thought it looked like a fun place to work...for a twentysomething. The kind of free-spirited, non-traditional videogame industry workplace he'd read about in magazines.

  Complete with a free-spirited, non-traditional boss.

  Without slowing his pace, Todd spun and pointed at Hannahlee and Dunne. "Who wants ice cream sundaes? Before we get started? Anyone?"

  Quincy waved his hand. "Right here, my good man!"

  Todd ignored him and turned back around to face forward. "Okay then," he said. "Let's skip straight to the cherry."

  Big frosted glass doors split apart at his approach. Dunne, Hannahlee, and Quincy followed him into a giant room like a movie theater, with rows of seats on tiers and a huge screen that took up a whole wall.

  "Make yourselves comfortable." Todd waved at the rows of seats as he jogged down the aisle toward the screen. Popping open a tinted glass cabinet set into the wall, he snatched out a laptop.

  Hannahlee sat in the front row, and Dunne sat beside her. Before Quincy could sit on the other side of her, though, Todd trotted over with the laptop and dived into the seat.

  Quincy stared at him for a moment, mouth open, about to say something...but Todd paid no attention to him. With a snort and a disgusted flick of the wrist, Quincy walked off to take a seat at the far end of the row.

  Todd popped open the laptop and hit a few keys. "Here we go." Suddenly, the big wall screen burst to life. "Welcome to Willowtopia."

  On the screen, computer graphics depicted a familiar scene. Seedy storefronts hunched along a city street at night, lit by flickering neon and dim streetlamps. Shadowy figures slouched along the sidewalk, trash blowing around their feet like tumbleweeds. Old cars with their windows smashed in sat on cement blocks, stripped and burned out. Screeching cats pitched their cries against distant squealing tires and the muffled shouts of angry drunks.

  Dunne recognized it instantly. "Cool," he said. "That's Scratchtown."

  "You betcha." Todd hit more keys on the laptop, and the scene shifted, rotating to show the other side of the street. A bearded, burly man in a gray fur coat sat on a stoop there, glowering over the glittering head of his bejeweled cane. He was surrounded by a dozen scantily-clad women of all sizes and colors. "Which would make them...?"

  "Jeremiah Weed," said Dunne.

  "And his Rainbow Brides." Quincy shouted it from the end of the row.

  "Arch-enemies of the Willows," said Dunne. "Appeared in eleven of the twenty released episodes."

  "Sex objects of Quincy Winslow," shouted Quincy. "Appeared in my wet dream fantasies for over thirty-four years!"

  "Let's jump in somewhere friendlier." Todd typed and worked the mouse pad on his laptop. The scene on the screen instantly changed to a grassy park under sunny blue skies.

  People in 1970s-style garb—bell-bottom jeans, silk print shirts, knee-high socks, short-shorts, and Earth shoes—mingled and chased Frisbees on the gently rolling hills. Some sat on park benches, some lay on picnic blankets. The biggest crowd gathered around a bronze statue at park center—a statue of two blindfolded men grappling.

  Dunne knew the statue well. It had been a gathering place in the TV show, too—the symbolic heart of many a soul-searching scene. The two blindfolded men were identical; they were meant to be the same man, fighting himself. The man is blind to his similarity to the enemy, to the fact that he's only hurting himself.

  The statue was called "My Foe." In the lore of Weeping Willows, it was cast by Bella's great-grandmother, Livia Armstrong, after World War I. One of Dunne's novels, in fact, was all about Livia and her struggle to erect "My Foe."

  It had been his worst-selling book.

  "Justice Commons," said Hannahlee.

  "Exactly," said Todd. "Players tend to congregate here. If we're going to bump into Gowdy, it'll be here."

  "What do you mean, 'bump into' him?" said Quincy. "I thought you could trace his I.P. address through the system."

  "Not that easy," said Todd. "We have thousands of avatars in the game, many with fabricated identities...at least a hundred registered under some variation of the name 'Cyrus Gowdy.' He could be one of them or none of them."

  "So trace 'em all!" said Quincy.

  "Do you know how long that would take?" Todd's fingers continued to fly over his laptop keyboard. "Long." On the big screen, three wireframes with human outlines appeared near "My Foe" in Justice Commons.

  As skin, clothes, and features flowed onto the figures, Dunne realized that he was looking at two men and a woman. Todd was building them, adding fresh detail with each keystroke.

  "Much easier if he identifies himself," said Todd. "We can mine his data in a heartbeat once we know which one he is."

  "So which one am I?" Suddenly, Quincy popped up in the next row back, directly behind Todd. No more sitting at the end of the row, away from the action, for him. "Am I the tall one with the wavy blond hair?" He pointed at one of the figures on the screen.

  "That's me." As he said it, Todd kept typ
ing. Army fatigues and a Day-Glo yellow smiley face t-shirt appeared on the blond avatar. "War Willow."

  "Oh." Quincy stuck a big arm over Todd's shoulder and pointed at the screen. "So that's me, then. The Buzz Willow lookalike."

  As Todd typed and moused, the other male figure gained a black crew-cut, glasses, and muttonchops. "That one's Dunne." More keystrokes put Buzz in a navy blue cardigan, khaki trousers, and light blue Oxford shirt complete with pocket protector.

  "And that's Hannahlee, of course," said Todd as the female avatar took on the look of a young Kitty Willow, circa 1976. Her feathered red hair was shiny and full. She wore a red pantsuit, complete with vest, over a white button-down blouse, open at the throat to frame a gold pendant. The pendant was the symbol of the Willows—a circle of joined hands with the scales of justice in the middle. The scales were shaped like a willow tree, with a trunk for the central mast and branches for the beam.

  "So fwhere am I?" said Quincy.

  "Fowhere," said Todd. "Now fut up before I frow you out!"

  Quincy stared at the back of Todd's head, looking stunned and indignant. His lips moved as if he were readying jabs of his own...and then he sunk back into his seat with an exasperated sigh.

  "Okay then." Todd kept typing on the laptop. "Let's start mingling, you guys."

  The three new avatars started walking through the crowd around "My Foe." As they passed, other characters—also made up to look like Willows notables—turned to look at them.

  Hannahlee gazed at the screen, its multicolored light dancing over her features. "Is this all they do?" she said. "Socialize?"

  Todd chuckled. "They do it all, Lianna. Have adventures, fall in love, start a business. Whatever people do in a world, because that's what this is. A whole world."

  "You built a whole world out of seventeen episodes?" said Hannahlee.

  Todd hiked a thumb at Dunne. "He built forty-three novels out of 'em. It's rich soil, Lianna. That's one of the reasons the show has held up so well after all these years."

  Another avatar done up like Buzz, with a slightly different haircut, waved at Dunne's Buzz. The new Buzz's mouth moved, and computer-generated speech played over the theater's speakers.

  "Hey, good-lookin'."

  Todd spoke. The onboard microphone on his keyboard picked up his words, and Dunne's Buzz avatar in the game repeated them. "You look familiar, but I can't place you."

  "I get that a lot," said the other Buzz as he wandered off-screen.

  Todd laughed. "There are five hundred some Buzzes in Willowtopia. The big names—War, Kitty, Leif, and Free—have two to three thousand a piece."

  "So out of all these copies," said Hannahlee, "how are we supposed to find Cyrus Gowdy?"

  "Ask around," said Todd. "Put the word out. The good thing is, no one knows it's you behind that Kitty avatar. Hopefully, even Cyrus won't figure it out till it's too late."

  "This could still take forever," said Dunne, "and we're under a time crunch. Someone's out to kill Gowdy and the Willows, remember?"

  "Then it's a good thing we have help." Todd typed furiously, and his War Willow avatar pushed through the crowd onscreen. He stopped at the base of "My Foe" and reached out a hand to a male avatar leaning against it.

  The avatar wore sunglasses and a black leather jacket and turtleneck. He also wore a black baseball cap with the black-and-white yin and yang symbol on the front; he took it off as he shook the hand of Todd's War, revealing slick, black hair with white streaks.

  "Everyone, this is Hiss Willow himself," said Todd. "Baine Sherwood."

  "Hello, Lianna," said the Hiss avatar on-screen. "Long time no betray."

  CHAPTER 16

  As Hiss Willow smirked on the screen, Quincy lunged over the seat-backs and made a grab for Todd's keyboard.

  "Don't deal with him!" said Quincy. "We can't trust him!"

  Todd wrestled the keyboard out of Quincy's grasp and shot to his feet. "You moron! He's an actor. He only played a conflicted character on the show."

  "He's a bad guy in real life, too!" Quincy pointed at the screen. "He's in bed with organized crime!"

  "Just a rumor, jerk-off!" said Todd. "We did a background check before we hired him, and he came up clean."

  "Hired him?" said Quincy. "You mean he works for you?"

  "How do you think we got thousands of fans to join up?" said Todd. "Baine's a resident antagonist. Players have the chance to go up against Hiss Willow himself and foil his schemes. Or team up with him, if he's on the side of justice that day."

  Quincy blew out his breath and slumped back in his seat. "Don't trust him," he said to Dunne and Hannahlee. "He could be the Willows killer, for all we know."

  Just then, Baine's avatar spoke up. "Hello? Todd? Lianna? Anyone home?"

  Todd sat back down and resumed typing. His War avatar patted Baine on the shoulder. "Sorry about the interruption," Todd told him. "Thanks for taking time to help us out."

  "My pleasure," said Baine. "I could use a break from all the double-crossing."

  "Fold ya so," said Quincy.

  Baine's avatar stepped up to Hannahlee's and bowed. "Wonderful to see you, dear sister. You don't look a day older."

  Todd popped open the armrest beside him and pulled an earpiece out of the compartment within. Reaching over, he placed it on Hannahlee's ear. "Just talk to him," he said. "This'll catch and transmit your voice."

  Hannahlee adjusted the earpiece. "Hello? Baine?"

  "In the flesh, my love," said Baine's avatar.

  Dunne frowned. Hearing Hiss, the sometime turncoat of the Willows, call Kitty his "love" did not seem right. They were just two actors who had played those roles thirty years ago, but it still felt wrong for the "bad guy" to say that to the "good girl."

  "How do I know that's really you?" said Hannahlee. "Other than taking Mr. Myriada's word for it."

  Baine laughed. "Remember Acapulco? I called you Joan of Ark." His avatar kissed her avatar's hand. Though the computerized voice didn't catch every nuance of human speech, it dropped and came close to sounding sensual. "Because you were so on fire."

  Dunne could not believe what he'd heard. If Hiss calling Kitty his "love" had seemed wrong, the revelation that they'd been intimately involved was downright blasphemous.

  Hiss and Kitty? In Acapulco?

  Dunne could hardly imagine it happening. In the show, Kitty had always been upstanding, moral, loyal, and unquestioningly trustworthy. Hiss—short for "Hyssop," like the herb—had been an antihero of dubious intent. He'd been the most troubled of the Willows, prone to falling in with bad company and doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. He'd strayed from the path of justice and double-crossed his family more than once out of arrogance and stubbornness. Though things had always worked out in the end, his actions had pushed the Willows ever closer to disaster. His brothers and sisters had never been sure of his true loyalties or whether they could rely on him.

  With his mingling of good and evil, highlighted by his black-and-white yin-yang motif, Hiss had been closer to reality than the other Willows on the show. Gowdy had designed him as a reflection of America, especially Richard Nixon—positive and negative qualities inextricably linked. As such, Hiss had been a risky character. He had a following and was touted as one of the ground-breaking elements of the show...but he was mostly seen as a villain. It didn't seem possible that he and Kitty—even the actors who'd played them—would have had an affair. Maybe Hiss, on an especially wicked day, might have made a pass...but Kitty? Fall for Hiss? It could never happen.

  Except it had.

  Hannahlee cleared her throat. "'Joan of Ark?'" she said. "It's really you, all right."

  Suddenly, a small piece of gray plastic landed in Dunne's lap. Looking up, he saw Quincy's hand overhead, full of cell phone parts.

  "Kitty and Hiss were lovers." Quincy sounded broken-hearted as he let the rest of the parts dribble down. "The ultimate blog scoop. Why didn't I wait to destroy my phone?"

  At that point,
Todd spoke up. "So what have you got for us, Baine? Anything on our friend?"

  "The last time I saw him was weeks ago," said Baine. "His avatar looked like Gary Escuchar."

  "Ranch hand at the Weellow place, señor," said Quincy. "Wise old gaucho Latino weeth a heart of gold. Corazon de oro."

  "So how many Gary Escuchar avatars are there?" said Dunne.

  "A hundred and fifty," said Todd.

  "But he's approached me as different avatars, too," said Baine. "He could be anyone."

  Dunne sighed. "So how do we find him?"

  "I've got an idea about that," said Baine. "But you've got to trust me."

  "Why?" said Hannahlee. "What are you going to do?"

  As limited as the avatars were in conveying expressions, Baine's avatar managed to shade his grin with menace. "What won't I do?" It was one of his catch phrases from the show.

  Baine's avatar snapped his fingers, and a huge bullhorn appeared in his hand. He turned the volume dial all the way up to MAX, then put the mouthpiece to his lips.

  "Everybody listen up." Baine's amplified voice boomed over the crowd in Justice Commons. The assembled avatars all stopped what they were doing, fell silent, and looked in Baine's direction.

  "I am going to murder my sister. The original Kitty Willow." A knife popped into Baine's hand, and he laid the blade against Hannahlee's avatar's throat. "Only one man can take her place. Only one man can stop the Willows Killer...if he's man enough.

  "Cyrus Gowdy, step right up."

  For a minute that felt like an hour, none of the avatars in Justice Commons made a move.

  "So, Todd," said Dunne. "What'll Baine do if Gowdy doesn't step up to save Hannahlee?"

  "Probably kill her," said Quincy. "This is Hiss Fwillow we're dealing with here, remember?"

  "Don't worry." On the big screen, Baine turned and winked at them. "It won't come to that."

  Dunne had his doubts...but it turned out that Baine was right. Too right.