The Starry Rift

by Jonathan Strahan

  Anda put her hand up. So did about half the girls in the room.

  “And how many of you play girls?”

  All the hands went down.

  “See, that’s a tragedy. Practically makes me weep. Gamespace smells like a boy’s armpit. It’s time we girled it up a little. So here’s my offer to you: if you will play as a girl, you will be given probationary memberships in the Clan Fahrenheit, and if you measure up, in six months, you’ll be full-fledged members.”

  In real life, Liza the Organiza was a little podgy, like Anda herself, but she wore it with confidence. She was solid, like a brick wall, her hair bobbed bluntly at her shoulders. She dressed in a black jumper over loose dungarees with giant goth boots with steel toes.

  She stomped her boots, one-two, thump-thump, like thunder on the stage. “Who’s in, chickens? Who wants to be a girl out-game and in?”

  Anda jumped to her feet. A Fahrenheit, with her own island! Her head was so full of it that she didn’t notice that she was the only one standing. The other girls stared at her, a few giggling and whispering.

  “That’s all right, love,” Liza called, “I like enthusiasm. Don’t let those staring faces rattle yer: they’re just flowers turning to look at the sky. Pink, scrubbed, shining, expectant faces. They’re looking at you because you had the sense to get to your feet when opportunity came—and that means that someday, girl, you are going to be a leader of women, and men, and you will kick arse. Welcome to the Clan Fahrenheit.”

  She began to clap, and the other girls clapped too, and even though Anda’s face was the color of a lollipop-lady’s sign, she felt like she might burst with pride and good feeling and she smiled until her face hurt.

  > Anda,

  her sergeant said to her,

  > how would you like to make some money?

  > Money, Sarge?

  Ever since she’d risen to platoon leader, she’d been getting more missions, but they paid gold—money wasn’t really something you talked about in-game.

  The Sarge—sensible boobs, gigantic sword, longbow, gloriously orcish ugly phiz—moved her avatar impatiently.

  > Something wrong with my typing, Anda?

  > No, Sarge.

  she typed.

  > You mean gold?

  > If I meant gold, I would have said gold. Can you go voice?

  Anda looked around. Her door was shut and she could hear her parents in the sitting-room watching telly. She turned up her music just to be safe and then slipped on her headset. They said it could noise-cancel a Blackhawk helicopter—it had better be able to overcome the little inductive speakers suction-cupped to the underside of her desk. She switched to voice.

  “Hey, Lucy,” she said.

  “Call me Sarge!” Lucy’s accent was American, like an old TV show, and she lived somewhere in the middle of the country where it was all vowels, Iowa or Ohio. She was Anda’s best friend in-game, but she was so hardcore it was boring sometimes.

  “Hi, Sarge,” she said, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice. She’d never smart off to a superior in-game, but v2v it was harder to remember to keep to the game norms.

  “I have a mission that pays real cash. Whichever paypal you’re using, they’ll deposit money into it. Looks fun, too.”

  “That’s a bit weird, Sarge. Is that against Clan rules?” There were a lot of Clan rules about what kind of mission you could accept, and they were always changing. There were curb-crawlers in gamespace and the way that the Clan leadership kept all the mummies, and daddies from going ape-poo about it was by enforcing a boring code of conduct that was meant to ensure that none of the Fahrenheit girlies ended up being virtual prozzies.

  “What?” Anda loved how Lucy quacked What? It sounded especially American. “No, geez. All the executives in the Clan pay the rent doing missions for money. Some of them are even rich from it, I hear! You can make a lot of money gaming, you know.”

  “Is it really true?” She’d heard about this, but she’d assumed it was just stories, like the kids who gamed so much that they couldn’t tell reality from fantasy. Or the ones who gamed so much that they stopped eating and got all anorexic. She wouldn’t mind getting a little anorexic, to be honest. Bloody podge.

  “Yup! And this is our chance to get in on the ground floor. Are you in?”

  “It’s not—you know, pervy, is it?”

  “Gag me. No. Jeez, Anda! Are you nuts? No—they want us to go kill some guys.”

  “Oh, we’re good at that!”

  The mission took them far from Fahrenheit Island, to a cottage on the far side of the gameworld. They were spotted by sentries long before they got within sight of the cottage, and they saw the warning spell travel up from the hilltop like a puff of smoke, speeding away toward the cottage. Anda raced up the hill while Lucy covered her with her bow, but that didn’t stop the sentries from subjecting Anda to a hail of flaming spears from their fortified position. Anda set up her standard dodge-and-weave pattern, assuming that the sentries were nonplayer characters—who wanted to pay to sit around in gamespace watching a boring road all day?—and to her surprise, the spears followed her. She took one in the chest and only some fast work with her shield and all her healing scrolls saved her. As it was, her constitution was knocked down by half, and she had to retreat back down the hillside.

  “Get down,” Lucy said in her headset. “I’m gonna use the BFG.”

  Every game had one—the Big Friendly Gun, the generic term for the baddest-arse weapon in the world. Lucy had rented this one from the Clan armory for a small fortune in gold, and Anda had laughed and called her paranoid. It was a huge, demented flaming crossbow that fired five-meter bolts that exploded on impact.

  “Fire!” Lucy called, and the game did this amazing and cool animation that it rewarded you with whenever you loosed a bolt from the BFG, making the gamelight dim toward the sizzling bolt as though it were sucking the illumination out of the world as it arced up the hillside, trailing a comet-tail of sparks. The game played them a groan of dismay from their enemies, and then the bolt hit home with a crash that made her point of view vibrate like an earthquake. The roar in her headphones was deafening, and behind it she could hear Lucy on the voice-chat, cheering it on.

  “Nuke ‘em till they glow and shoot ‘em in the dark! Yee-haw!” Lucy called, and Anda laughed and pounded her fist on the desk. Gobbets of former enemy sailed over the treeline dramatically.

  Now they had to move fast, for their enemies at the cottage would be alerted to their presence and waiting for them. They spread out into a wide flanking maneuver around the cottage’s sides, staying just outside of bow range, using scrying scrolls to magnify the cottage and make the foliage around them fade to translucency.

  There were four guards around the cottage, two with nocked arrows and two with whirling slings. One had a scroll out and was surrounded by the concentration marks that indicated spellcasting.

  “GO GO GO!” Lucy called.

  Anda went! She cast a shield spell. They cost a fortune and burned out fast, but whatever that guard was cooking up, it had to be bad news. She cast the spell as she charged for the cottage, and lucky thing, because there was a fifth guard up a tree who dumped a pot of boiling oil on her that would have cooked her down to her bones in ten seconds if not for the spell.

  She reached the fifth man as he was trying to draw his dirk and dagger and lopped his bloody head off in one motion, then back-flipped off the high branch, trusting to her shield to stay intact for her impact on the cottage roof.

  The strategy worked—now she had the drop (literally!) on the remaining guards, having successfully taken the high ground. In her headphones, she could hear the sound of Lucy making mayhem, the grunts as she pounded her keyboard mingling with the in-game shrieks as her arrows found homes in the chests of two more of the guards.

  Shrieking a berzerker wail, Anda jumped down off of the roof and landed on one of the two remaining guards, plunging her sword into his chest and pinning him i
n the dirt. Her sword stuck in the ground, and she hammered on her keys, trying to free it, while the remaining guard ran for her on-screen. Anda pounded her keyboard, but it was useless: the sword was good and stuck. Poo. She’d blown a small fortune on spells and rations for this project, with the expectation of getting some real cash out of it, and now it was all lost.

  She moved her hands to the part of the keypad that controlled motion and began to run, waiting for the guard’s sword to find her avatar’s back and knock her into the dirt.

  “Got ‘im!” It was Lucy, in her headphones. She wheeled her avatar about so quickly it was nauseating and saw that Lucy was on her erstwhile attacker, grunting as she engaged him close-in. Something was wrong, though: despite Lucy’s avatar’s awesome stats and despite Lucy’s own skill at the keyboard, she was being taken to the cleaners. The guard was kicking her ass. Anda went back to her stuck sword and recommenced whanging on it, watching helplessly as Lucy lost her left arm, then took a cut on her belly, then another to her knee.

  “Shit!” Lucy said in her headphones as her avatar began to keel over. Anda yanked her sword free—finally—and charged at the guard, ululating her war cry. He managed to get his sword up before she reached him, but she got in a lucky swing and danced back before he could counterstrike. Now she closed carefully, moving in for a fast kill.

  “Lucy?”

  “Call me Sarge!”

  “Sorry, Sarge. Where’d you respawn?”

  “I’m all the way over at Body Electric—it’ll take me hours to get there. Do you think you can complete the mission on your own?”

  “Uh, sure.” Thinking, Crikey, if that’s what the guards outside were like, howm I gonna get past the inside guards?

  “You’re the best, girl. Okay, enter the cottage and kill everyone there.”

  “Uh, sure.”

  She wished she had another scrying scroll in inventory so she could get a look inside the cottage before she beat its door in, but she was fresh out of scrolls and just about everything else.

  She kicked the door in and her fingers danced. She’d killed four of her adversaries before she even noticed that they weren’t fighting back.

  In fact, they were generic avatars, maybe even nonplayer characters. They moved like total noobs, milling around in the little cottage. Around them were thousands and thousands of shirts. Incredibly, some noobs were still sitting, crafting more shirts, ignoring the swordswoman who’d just butchered their companions.

  She took a careful look at all the avatars in the room. None of them were armed. Tentatively, she walked up to one of the players and cut his head off. The player next to him moved clumsily to one side, and she followed him.

  “Are you a player or a bot?” she typed.

  The avatar did nothing. She killed it.

  “Lucy, they’re not fighting back.”

  “Good, kill them all.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah—that’s the orders. Kill them all and then I’ll make a phone call and some guys will come by and verify it and then you haul ass back to the island. I’m coming out there to meet you, but it’s a long haul from the respawn gate. Keep an eye on my stuff, okay?”

  “Sure,” Anda said, and killed two more. That left ten. One two one two and through and through, she thought, lopping their heads off. One left. He stood off in the back.

  > no porfa necesito mi plata

  Spanish. She could always paste the text into a translation bot on one of the chat channels, but who cared? She cut his head off.

  “They’re all dead,” she said into her headset.

  “Good job!” Lucy said. “Okay, I’m gonna make a call. Sit tight.”

  Bo-ring. The cottage was filled with corpses and shirts. The kind of shirts you crafted when you were down at Level 0 and trying to get basic skillz. Add it all together and you barely had two thousand gold.

  Just to pass the time, she pasted the Spanish into the chatbot.

  > no [colloquial] please, I need my [colloquial] [money/silver]

  Pathetic. A few thousand golds—he could make that much by playing a couple of the beginner missions. Crafting shirts!

  She left the cottage and patrolled around it. Twenty minutes later, two more avatars showed up. More generics.

  > are you players or bots?

  she typed, though she had an idea they were players. Bots moved better.

  > any trouble?

  Well, all right then.

  > no trouble

  > good

  One player entered the cottage and came back out again. The other player spoke.

  > you can go now

  “Lucy?”

  “What’s up?”

  “Two blokes just showed up and told me to piss off. They’re noobs, though. Should I kill them?”

  “No! Jeez, Anda, those are the contacts. They’re just making sure the job was done. Get my stuff and meet me at Marionettes Tavern, okay?”

  As she made her way home, she snuck a peek back at the cottage. It was in flames, the two noobs standing amid them, burning slowly along with the cottage and a few thousand golds’ worth of badly crafted shirts.

  That month, she fought her way through six more missions, and the paypal she used filled with real, honest-to-goodness cash, pounds sterling that she could withdraw from the cashpoint situated exactly 501 meters away from the school gate, next to the candy shop that was likewise 501 meters away.

  “Anda, I don’t think it’s healthy for you to spend so much time with your game,” her da said, prodding her bulging podge with a finger. “It’s not healthy.”

  “Daaaa!” she said, pushing his finger aside. “I go to PE every stinking day. It’s good enough for the Ministry of Education.”

  “I don’t like it,” he said. He was no movie star himself, with a little potbelly that he wore his belted trousers high upon, a wobbly extra chin. She pinched his chin and wiggled it.

  “I get loads more exercise than you, Mr. Pot.”

  “But I pay the bills around here, little Miss Kettle.”

  “You’re not seriously complaining about the cost of the game?” she said, infusing her voice with incredulity. “Ten quid a week, and I get unlimited calls, texts, and messages! Plus play, of course, and the in-game encyclopedia and spellchecker and translator bots!” (Every member of the Fahrenheits memorized this for dealing with recalcitrant parental units.) “Fine then. If the game is too dear for you, Da, let’s set it aside and I’ll just start using a normal phone; is that what you want?”

  Her da held up his hands. “I surrender, Miss Kettle. But do try to get a little more exercise, please? Fresh air? Sport? Games?”

  “Getting my head trodden on in the hockey pitch, more like,” she said darkly.

  “Zackly!” he said, prodding her podge anew. “That’s the stuff! Getting my head trodden on was what made me the man I are today!”

  Her da could bluster all he liked about paying the bills, but she had pocket money for the first time in her life: not book-tokens and fruit-tokens and milk-tokens that could be exchanged for “healthy” snacks and literature. She had real money, cash money that she could spend outside of the five-hundred-meter sugar-free zone around her school.

  “Go get a BFG,” Lucy said. “We’re going on a mission.”

  Lucy’s voice in her ear was a constant companion in her life now. When she wasn’t on Fahrenheit Island, she and Lucy were running missions into the wee hours of the morning. The Fahrenheit armorers, nonplayer characters, had learned to recognize her, and they had the Clan’s BFGs oiled and ready for her when she showed up.

  “Sarge?”

  “Yes, Anda?”

  “I just can’t understand why anyone would pay us cash for these missions.”

  “You complaining?”

  “No, but—”

  “Anyone asking you to cyber some old pervert?”

  “No!”

  “Okay then. I don’t know either. But the money’s good. I don’t care. Hell
, probably it’s two rich gamers who pay their butlers to craft for them all day. One’s fucking with the other one and paying us.”

  “You really think that?”

  Lucy sighed a put-upon, sophisticated, American sigh. “Look at it this way. Most of the world is living on, like, a dollar a day. I spend five dollars every day on a Frappuccino. Some days, I get two! Dad sends mom three thousand a month in child support—that’s a hundred bucks a day. So, if a day’s money here is a hundred dollars, then to an African or whatever, my Frappuccino is worth, like, five hundred dollars. And I buy two or three every day.

  “And we’re not rich! There’s craploads of rich people who wouldn’t think twice about spending five hundred bucks on a coffee—how much do you think a hot dog and a Coke go for on the space station? A thousand bucks!

  “So that’s what I think is going on. There’s someone out there, some Saudi or Japanese guy or Russian mafia kid who’s so rich that this is just chump change for him, and he’s paying us to mess around with some other rich person. To them, we’re like the Africans making a dollar a day to craft—I mean, sew—T-shirts. What’s a couple hundred bucks to them? A cup of coffee.”

  “Three o’clock,” Anda said, and aimed the BFG again. More snipers pat-patted in bits around the forest floor.

  “Nice one, Anda.”

  “Thanks, Sarge.”

  They smashed half a dozen more sniper outposts before coming upon the cottage.

  “Bloody hell,” Anda breathed. The cottage was ringed with guards, forty or fifty of them, with bows and spells and spears, in entrenched positions.

  “This is nuts,” Lucy agreed. “I’m calling them. This is nuts.”

  There was a muting click as Lucy rang off, and Anda used up a scrying scroll on the guards. They were loaded down with spells, a couple of them were guarding BFGs and the fabled BFG10K, something that was removed not long after gameday one, as too disruptive to the balance of power. Supposedly, one or two existed, but that was just a rumor. Wasn’t it?

  “Okay,” Lucy said. “Okay, this is how this goes. We’ve got to do this. I just called in three squads of Fahrenheit veterans and their noob prentices for backup.” Anda summed that up in her head to a hundred player characters and maybe three hundred nonplayer characters: familiars, servants, demons . . .