Firewall

by Sean Rodman

  I try. I really do.

  But just as I’m drifting off, my phone buzzes with an incoming text. Jane.

  Why won’t u call?

  Now I’m wide awake again. I spend thirty minutes lying there with my eyes open, staring at the streetlight through my window. I don’t have an answer for her. And it’s clear that sleep isn’t going to happen for a while yet. I quietly reach over and snag my laptop off the desk. Flipping it on, I log back into Killswitch. The company logo appears first, intertwined letters in gothic script. Then the menu screen. A message pops up in a chat box in the corner of the screen.

  [GRIGGS: back online?]

  [JOSH: totally. better stick to text, skip the headsets. don’t want Big Dog to hear me and lose laptop again.] I type quietly. I might be paranoid, but if Dad shows up unexpectedly and finds me gaming? Not good. Best to be stealthy.

  Griggs sends me a bunch of laughing cartoon-face emoticons, then:

  [GRIGGS: which mod?]

  [JOSH: not wolf clan. they were sketchy. not sure what. hold on.]

  I click through different matches currently in progress. Thing is, since Killswitch became really popular, there are more and more idiots playing. Like those guys who killed my character. Groups who form a team or “clan,” buy a bunch of upgrades and go on a rampage. They don’t actually try to play the game the way it was designed. It was supposed to be about stealth and smarts. If you play it right, Killswitch is all about building up your defenses, sneaking around enemy bases, creating new weapons. Using your brain to outwit the guards. Stuff that I’m good at.

  That leaves playing the “mods.” The game designers of Killswitch decided to include a construction kit with the game, allowing anybody to modify the game to create their own version to play. It’s like playing with building blocks. Only you end up creating a virtual world where other people can join in. Some people get right into designing them—there are hundreds of mods available on the server. I scroll through the listings. Most of them have stupid names like JAYIZAWESOME and are equally lame.

  But it’s late, and I’m bored. There has to be something worth playing. Then I find one I haven’t seen before. VTON. I message Griggs, then click on the title. A couple of seconds to load up, and I’m in. Griggs’s soldier appears next to me in a showy burst of gold static. I slowly pan around, taking in the landscape around us.

  It’s nothing like any of the games I’ve ever played in Killswitch. Or anywhere, come to think of it.

  [GRIGGS: ????] Griggs is clearly as confused as I am.

  There are no ruined buildings, no battlefield, no hovering bugchoppers. No enemy soldiers. Instead, we’re in the middle of a small town at night. Overhead, a row of streetlights illuminates the lawns of suburban homes. Way off in the distance, I see a traffic light flick from red to green. But there are no cars driving down the street. In fact, no movement anywhere. The houses are dark. It’s like whoever built this mod forgot to include any people. It’s just the two of us. Two heavily armed cyborg soldiers. Standing in the middle of a suburban road. Feeling confused as hell.

  I start walking toward an intersection. The detail in this mod is amazing. When I get close enough I can see the letters on the street signs. These ones read Wentworth Rd. and Ancaster Ave. I have a weird flash of déjà vu. It takes me a second, but then I know where I’ve seen them before.

  [JOSH: follow me] I start jogging down Ancaster. More of the same—quiet streets, sleeping houses. We pass a convenience store closed up for the night. It’s neon sign glows above the empty sidewalk.

  Then I slide to a stop. We’re standing outside a little house, a single-story bungalow. Pretty familiar. In fact, very familiar.

  [JOSH: check it out] I watch Griggs’s warfighter lumber around the edges of the fence, then turn back to me. [JOSH: look closer]

  [GRIGGS: I don’t get it. what?] He can’t make his warfighter shrug, but I can sense his confusion. I move toward the house, open the gate and walk up to the front door. I stand right under the house number and point my weapon at it.

  Then Griggs gets it.

  [GRIGGS: 9054 Ancaster? that’s your address. this is YOUR house!!! WTF!!!!]

  I laugh out loud at the weirdness of it all. Someone put my house into the game—like, the house I’m sitting in. Right now. In real life.

  How awesome is that?

  [JOSH: it’s all here. I think this mod IS Valleytown]

  Chapter Four

  “King of the world!” shouts Griggs, so loud that his voice gets fuzzed by my headset. His warfighter is standing on top of the church steeple near the center of Valleytown. I’m way down below in the city square. I can see his little arms raised in victory, high above me.

  “Using a jetpack to get up there is cheating,” I say.

  “Cheating? We agreed that the race was to the highest point in Valleytown. We didn’t say how to get there.”

  “Whatever. I didn’t know you had a jetpack.”

  “I upgraded after we won that last campaign. Didn’t you?”

  The buildings around the center square distract me from his chatter. I’ve started to notice a few things about the virtual version of Valleytown. Whoever created it has spent a crazy amount of time getting the details right on certain things—like street layouts, and particular neighborhoods. But other parts are undefined. The church, for example, looks like a cardboard cutout shaded in basic gray. The real version has white paint with red trim, ornate stained-glass windows—but there’s none of that here. The church clearly wasn’t important to whoever made the mod.

  “Hello? Earth to Josh?” says Griggs. “I said, look over there.”

  He’s still perched up on the steeple, arm held out like a wind vane. I follow where he’s pointing and can just make out a weird blue glow behind a low apartment block to the west.

  “I can’t see from down here,” I say.

  “So just fly up here—oh, wait. You can’t. Just buy the jetpack next time, will you? I’m coming down.” Griggs leaps, rebounds off the church roof and lands on the street below. There’s a little flash indicating he’s lost some health points from the fall. But we played all last night and for about an hour after school today and still haven’t seen anyone else in the mod. We seem to be the only ones here. So I’m not worried about taking damage from doing stupid things like jumping off tall buildings. Nobody is going to try to kill us.

  “Follow me,” says Griggs. “I saw something cool over there.” Our two warfighters stomp down Main Street, past simplified versions of the real stores—Jansen’s Hardware, the FrosT-Queen, the bank. It still gives me a weird, dislocated feeling to see real places in here, like I’m in two places at once.

  We turn off Main Street onto one that’s lined with houses, called Bendis Crescent. Unlike in real life, the houses here are perfectly identical—a single 3-D model that’s been “cloned” again and again, creating a row of homes. Each one is labeled with a street number but is otherwise indistinguishable from the others.

  Halfway down the street we find one house that is definitely different—it’s on fire. Strange blue flames leap out of the windows, flowing around the roofline. The sound of a crackling fire rises in volume as we stop and stare.

  “Wow,” says Griggs. “I wonder how you do that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, how do you set stuff on fire? I mean, have you tried blowing anything up in the game yet?”

  “Honestly, it hadn’t even occurred to me—there are no bad guys here.”

  “Watch,” says Griggs. He turns around and faces a regular home across the street from the burning building. He raises one arm, and a mini-missile the size of a football unpacks from his wrist armor. He squeezes his fist, and the mini-missile leaps forward. It flashes toward the building and detonates in a cloud of smoke and flame. When it clears, the house is still standing. Untouched, as if nothing happened.

  “Indestructible. Just like everything in this town. When I was waiting for you to come
online tonight, I experimented. Doesn’t matter what weapon or what target. Radium gun versus trees. Chain cannon versus windows. Seems like nothing in the game can be destroyed, no matter what you use.”

  “What about the mod editor?” That’s the construction kit that lets you edit objects within the game—kind of like a drawing program in three dimensions.

  “Password protected. Can’t even open it up. I guess the guy who made the mod is the only one who can change anything.”

  “So why did he set this place on fire?” We both turn and watch the house continue to burn in the blue inferno. Mind you, the house isn’t collapsing or anything. It’s like a film loop, a moment of disaster caught on endless replay. Behind a sheet of weird flames, I can make out the house number—304 Bendis Crescent. What was so special about this place?

  “Follow me!” Griggs suddenly says. “There’s something else you need to see!” I watch his warfighter leap down the street, jetpacks flaring. I follow him on the ground, cutting over fences and across lawns to keep up with him. It’s settled. Next opportunity, I’m getting a jetpack.

  A few minutes later we arrive at the edge of a big complex of buildings. It’s been created in the same way the church was. Flat gray angles, like a paper cutout version of a real structure. It’s easy enough to figure out what the buildings are, even without the sign out front. McCallum High School.

  “Griggs,” I say. “You want to spend more time at school? There’s got to be something better for us to do.”

  “Yeah yeah. Follow me inside.” His warfighter stomps forward across the flat gray “lawn” to the front doors of the school. I lag behind, looking at a graffiti tag scrawled on an otherwise blank wall—SUDO, in black balloon letters. It’s weirdly familiar.

  “Keep up, will you?” Griggs says. He pushes open the doors, and we walk into the school. We’re in the main atrium, hallways branching off to our left and right. It’s shadowy in here, so it takes a moment for me to realize that there are a bunch of human figures standing silently in front of us. A crowd of statues.

  “I didn’t think there were any people in this mod—wait, why aren’t they moving?” I say. Griggs’s warfighter clicks on his helmet light, and I make mine do the same. We weave the spotlights from figure to figure. The body of each person is either a generic male or female civilian figure, straight out of the basic game. The men are all wearing T-shirts and jeans, and the women are in skirts and tops. But each face is unique. Though distorted and blurred, each one is definitely taken from a real photograph.

  “You recognize anyone?” says Griggs. “I think this is the biology teacher.”

  It takes me a second to realize what’s going on.

  “Whoever made this place created these people too. He must have taken pictures from Facebook or Instagram or something and pasted them onto the basic characters in the game.”

  Griggs grunts thoughtfully. “So he built the school, then filled it with his friends?”

  “I’m not sure about that.” The distorted figures look creepy, anguished. “If he had a bunch of friends, wouldn’t they be playing the game with him? Instead, he’s got these freaky zombie-doll versions.”

  Griggs grunts. “Good point.”

  “Let’s get out of here. This is getting strange.” I turn around and go back out the main doors.

  Over the next few nights Griggs and I explore more of the Valleytown mod. We discover a few cool things. More figures with pasted-on faces taken from photographs—some adults, some kids, nobody that I recognize. Lots of areas that seem to be under construction or abandoned. Roads that simply stop, or half-finished buildings in basic gray cutout form.

  Eventually Griggs and I run out of places to explore, so we decide to goof around and climb an electrical tower to get a better view. Just like in real life, these towers are four or five stories tall and made out of cross-hatched metal girders. We race up the tower, then stop at the top, next to the thick power lines that swing out across the void to the next tower. And the next, and the next—a long row of towers stretching across the town. Way off in the distance I see a familiar blue glow again.

  “Check it out. There’s something else on fire over there.” Griggs follows the direction I’m pointing in.

  “Yeah, I see it. Let’s go.” There’s a flare of jets from his pack, and he soars away. “Catch me if you can.”

  Damn. It takes me a while on foot, following the towers until I reach the place where the electrical towers stop and all the power lines converge. This place is really detailed. The mod-maker spent time getting everything just right. There’s even a metal fence with a mounted sign near the one gate—Electrical Substation #32. No Trespassing. Hazard. A silhouette of a figure being zapped by a lightning bolt. And I understand why they’d want to keep people out. Beyond the fence is a wild nest of electrical cables hung between spidery metal frames. Scattered throughout are towers of black discs and round metal drums. The whole thing crackles occasionally as blue lightning bolts flash from tower to tower.

  “Want to go inside?” asks Griggs.

  “Are you crazy? That’s like a mad scientist’s deathtrap in there. Anyway, why would you want to?”

  “That is the big question,” he says. “Why would you want to build any of this? Who is this guy?”

  Chapter Five

  My routine is the same every day for the next week. I slide through the school day like a fish underwater, trying not to raise a ripple on the surface. Keep to myself. Face buried in my phone when I’m not in class, an invisible shield between me and everybody else. I see Griggs occasionally as he moves between his different social groups, but we connect less and less during school hours. I think he actually enjoys being around everybody in school. For me, it’s just a clock ticking down until I can get back to my laptop.

  I ride the bus home. I get my homework done as quickly as I can. If Dad’s around, there’s some small talk. But he wouldn’t understand that the best part of my day starts after he goes to bed. That’s when I fire up the laptop and visit the virtual Valleytown. Griggs usually shows up for a couple of hours, and we explore. Eventually we come to realize that this mod is a ghost town. There’s never been any sign of other players. Never any sign that whoever made this place has returned to it.

  Which is fine by me, because it means I can use the place as my private playground. Tonight we’re playing an epic game of Capture the Flag through the town. My home base is at the FrosT-Queen. I’m holed up behind the drive-through window, pinned down by bone-shaking blasts from Griggs’s radium gun.

  “Give it up!” he yells. Green lightning flashes over my head.

  “Come and get it!” I yell back. I know that the walls of the FrosT-Queen are indestructible, just like everything else in the mod. I’m safe as long as I stay below the level of the counter. Then something comes flying through the window and rattles to a stop at my feet. It’s a cartoon bomb, a black round ball with a white fuse sticking out the top of it and the word Boom! written on the side.

  “Seriously?” I say, just as the bomb detonates. My screen flashes red, and I see a picture of my warfighter splattering into a million pixelated bits.

  “You like my secret weapon?” Griggs asks. I tap on my keyboard and respawn my character next to his, standing outside the fast-food restaurant.

  “Very classy. You make it yourself?” I say.

  “Yeah, I used the mod editor."

  “You make anything else in here?”

  “Not yet. Want to try?” I grunt yes and call up the mod editor. Half my screen still has the in-game view of my warfighter and the FrosT-Queen. The other half of the screen is filled with green and white letters and numbers. There are options for changing variables within the game, like how hard gravity will pull you down or the position of the sun in the sky. There are also tools for altering the landscape—one that will raise or lower the level of the ground, another that will let you paint surfaces with different textures or colors. I tentatively try a few opt
ions on the FrosT-Queen sign. Each click of my mouse is rewarded with the same message.

  [Permission denied. Access privileges insufficient.]

  I hear Griggs mutter through my headset. “I’m locked out.”

  “But you made that bomb,” I say.

  “Yeah. But it was my own possession, right? It’s like we can change our own stuff, but not anything in the world around us.”

  We spend the next hour trying to see if there are any exceptions to this rule.

  Which, it turns out, there aren’t.

  “This sucks, man,” says Griggs. “This mod is pretty much abandoned. It’s not like anyone cares about it but us. We should be able to tweak it the way we want.”

  “I agree. It’s like salvage rights. You find an abandoned boat, you get to keep it. Same thing. Law of the sea.”

  “Law of the sea, huh? You spend way too much time learning useless crap, you know that?” says Griggs. “But I agree. This place is ours now.” He pauses, and I watch his warfighter lob a couple of experimental grenade rounds toward the neon FrosT letters on the sign. As always, when the smoke clears there’s no sign of any damage.

  “We need someone with some real skills to unlock this thing. Give us top-level privileges. We need a hacker.” He looks at me, and suddenly I see where this is going. “What about that girl you knew in Chicago? She was into programming, right?”

  “She was. Still is, I guess. And no, I’m not talking to her.”

  Griggs’s warfighter spins toward me.

  “Don’t be such a chicken. You said she’s been texting you. Jane, right? She wants to talk to you. Give her a call and ask for a little favor.”

  “You’re totally wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Problem is, Griggs is totally right. Jane is kind of a genius with computers. She had a job with her dad’s tech company as a junior system administrator by the time she was fourteen. If anyone can open up this abandoned piece of software like a can of tuna, it is her.