by Stan Lee
Cameron wishes he didn’t know that. Because when you’ve seen something like that, it stands to reason that you should do something, reach out and try to help—but how? How do you explain to your best friend that you know there’s something he’s not telling you? The more easily Cameron can communicate with the phone in his friend’s pocket, the further away Juaquo feels.
That was when Cameron decided that he doesn’t want this. He doesn’t want any of it. He hates knowing so much, and hates himself for letting the knowledge in. If he were a better person, he would find a way to stop it. It makes him feel like a Peeping Tom, helping himself to information that he isn’t supposed to have. Even the ones who aren’t doing ugly things from behind the safety of their screens have secrets. His mom, for instance, has a dating app on her phone—and she uses it. The idea of Mom going out with guys makes Cameron feel as guilty as he is grossed out; she’s never mentioned it, but he should have asked. Of course she’s dating. Why wouldn’t she? And what kind of asshole has to get struck by lightning to realize that his mom is a person with her own life? She’s been seeing the same guy for a while now, someone named Jeff, who Cameron is willing to admit seems pretty okay. Even after raiding his mom’s data for Jeff’s full name and address—followed by an old-fashioned Google deep dive into the guy’s online life, and a few rudimentary hacks—he’d found nothing more objectionable than a mild Star Wars obsession and an ongoing battle with toenail fungus. But Mom tells this guy everything, things Cameron never knew, things about Cameron that she’d never admit to his face. The phone in her pocket is like a Pandora’s box of horrors, one that Cameron can’t help opening even though he always, always wishes he didn’t. She thinks her son has emotional problems. She thinks it’s all her fault. She wishes she’d done so many things differently. She worries about his isolation, his pain, his scars, and his future—especially his future, because she worries that he doesn’t have one. A few nights back, she texted Jeff:
He’s not the same as he was.
I don’t know what to do.
I don’t want him to be alone his whole life.
Jeff had written back: Yeah, but maybe that’s what HE wants.
For a random middle-aged guy with unstoppable toenail fungus, Jeff was actually pretty insightful.
And is that what Cameron wants? A few weeks ago, he would have said no, of course not. He wanted what everyone wants: to be liked, to be seen, to be surrounded by friends. To meet a girl—because, Jesus, he’d never had a girlfriend, never even kissed a girl except on a dare, and always to uproarious laughter, because everyone knew that Cameron Ackerson had lived his whole life in the dreaded friend zone. He wanted to go to college and meet new people and have a big, full, exciting life—wife, kids, house, pets, the whole damn dream. Of course he didn’t want to be alone.
But that was before. Now being around people means being around their devices, too, gritting his teeth through all that noise. He can barely walk down the street or ride a bus without being bombarded by data; how is he going to cope when he’s back in a classroom at school? Or living in a dorm, a building full of hundreds of kids, all with a smartphone in their pocket? It’s bad enough being slapped in the brain by the contents of Mom’s phone every day, and that’s somebody he loves and trusts. How is he supposed to make friends, or date, when their deepest, darkest digital secrets are hovering in the air between them? How will he keep up the exhausting pretense that he’s still just like everyone else? The stronger his abilities get—and they’re getting stronger every day—the more he feels like he’s losing his grip on the real world. Some days he doesn’t even feel human anymore.
Gaming is where he gets away from all that, losing himself in a virtual world that he’s gaining more and more control over as time goes on. He was always talented, even in his old life when he played under his usual handle—but as Lord Respawn, he’s unstoppable. At first, being able to communicate with the software just enhanced his gameplay; with the code in his head whispering every player’s next move to him before it happened on screen, he could anticipate his opponents’ movements and take them out with a single, supernaturally accurate shot. But when winning got boring, things started to get weird . . . and maybe a little fun. Once he began to challenge himself, he realized: with a flex of his new mental muscles, he can remake the games from the inside, changing everything from the landscape to the weaponry to what the players are wearing. Sometimes he charges through at impossible speeds, blowing apart his enemies with a giant banana instead of a gun. Sometimes he changes up his avatar, running into a warehouse and emerging at the other end as Homer Simpson, or Shaft, or a grizzly bear wearing a prom dress. Once, he froze the entire landscape and forced every single avatar to drop their pants and do the Dougie, giggling as he imagined the players on the other side of the screen mashing their controllers and howling in frustration.
Today he’s playing on autopilot: dominating every match, killing fluidly, reshaping the games when it occurs to him, but mostly enjoying the carnage. His character is rampaging through a new board: a vast, shining city that he’s overlaid with steampunk architecture, just to make it more interesting. Gleaming zeppelins cruise by overhead, depositing assassins who swarm toward him down an elaborate series of spiral staircases, catwalks, and scaffolds. He crouches on a long, sloping bridge with two glass spires at either end, idly messing with his weaponry while he waits for his enemies to converge on his position. Before the lightning strike, this would have been game over: he’s about to get caught in a crossfire, trapped and exposed with no way out. But now, he’s untouchable. Unstoppable. His opponents’ bullets might as well be rose petals for all the damage they do to his invincible avatar.
When an RPG blows Lord Respawn’s head off, Cameron needs a full sixty seconds to comprehend what he just saw. His avatar tumbles off the catwalk and plummets to the ground, exploding into a crumpled, bleeding pile of pixels. He’s dropped dead right in the middle of the action, and none of the other players seems to notice—but Cameron, for the first time today, is truly paying attention. He quits the other two games and stares at the remaining screen, gaping.
What just happened?
He reaches out to sift through the code, expecting the game to offer an explanation, but there’s nothing. It has to be some kind of fluke; he never even saw it coming. Someone got lucky, he thinks. But someone will not get lucky again. He respawns, armoring himself this time in an impenetrable force field and charging up the staircase nearest him, spiraling up the face of the glass spire, his gun cocked and ready. As he rounds a corner, he nearly runs headlong into another avatar: she’s wearing an old-school aviator’s uniform, goggles and all, a mass of fiery red hair spilling out from underneath her cap. She’s just standing there—must be some girl, he thinks; she probably liked the pretty avatar and has no actual idea how to play. He rolls his eyes and moves to step around her.
She steps with him, blocking his path. He tries again: same result. She’s sticking to him like glue. Fine, then; if she won’t move, she can die. He’s about to strike her down—and maybe torch her account for good measure, just to teach her a lesson—when he realizes that he can’t. The system isn’t responding; his commands are met with sluggish resistance, like the flow of data has been choked off somewhere by strong, unyielding hands. The aviatrix winks, tips Lord Respawn a flirty wave . . . and then drives a long-handled knife through his chest. His frustration evaporates, replaced by a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. As he stares at his avatar, destroyed for the second time in as many minutes, a private message appears on the screen:
Hello, sailor. I’ve been dying to meet you.
No, Cameron thinks. No way. It doesn’t mean anything. Hello, sailor: that’s just a thing people say sometimes, a line from a movie or something. It’s just a coincidence. There’s no way the person behind that avatar knows he is Cameron Ackerson; how could she?
If you ever meet me again, dying is exactly what you’ll do, he writes back
. I own this board, little girl. Go play somewhere else.
But the next message makes his stomach drop even further.
You can’t beat me, friend. You’ve got a better chance of being struck by lightning.
Cameron squeals out loud, so furious that he lunges for the keyboard before remembering that he no longer has to—and that this isn’t the time to fire off a string of angry insults without thinking. Backing away, he takes a deep breath. Careful, he thinks. Careful.
Who are you? he sends back.
The next message appears instantly.
I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you . . . again. Catch me if you can.
He doesn’t hesitate, but this time there’s no resistance in the system. The aviatrix turns toward him, brandishing her knife. He lets her take a single step—just one.
Then he incinerates her.
A moment later, she reappears—but the sinking sensation doesn’t. Cameron is feeling something else, something he hasn’t felt in an awfully long time: exhilaration. She’s playing me, he thinks, with something like delight. Goading, taunting. She let him kill her only to pop back up again: it doesn’t feel like a threat. It feels like a challenge, in the best way. Whoever this girl is, she’s a worthy opponent. He can feel her out there, waiting for his next move, and realizes at the same time that he can’t anticipate hers. Unlike the other players, she’s figured out a way to mask her code, to lock him out—which means that she’s given Cameron the one thing he thought he’d never experience again.
A real game.
It’s like she’s read his mind.
Nice kill, says the message on screen. Let’s play.
Hours later, Cameron slumps back on the couch, heart pounding, breathing hard, as though he’d been running for his life in meatspace instead of inside a game. It was the best fight he’d ever had. He’d pulled out all the stops, stretched his abilities to the limit, and still found himself evenly matched at every turn. His opponent wasn’t as creative as he was, but she was just as gifted: wrenching his weapons out of his hands as fast as he could fabricate them, finding holes in the defenses he’d constructed to be impermeable. They raced out of the city and into a forest, where he built himself a fortress; she plucked a single block from the foundation and the whole thing crumbled like a Jenga tower. When he got a rare direct hit and blasted her avatar through the guts, she got up with a cannon suddenly mounted in the hole where her belly had been, and returned fire while he literally died laughing. He gave his avatar a pair of giant mechanical arms; she ripped them off and beat him to death with them. Finally, by unspoken agreement, they rampaged through the game side by side, cutting down every player in their path and skidding to a halt at the barren limits of the digital world: alone, covered in the blood of their enemies, looking back at the smoking carnage behind them. The glass city was in ruins, with a smoking zeppelin impaled on top of the only spire left standing. The digital corpses of other, unsuspecting players were strewn behind them like broken dolls. The game’s adjacent forums were already lighting up with theories about the shock wave that just ran through the system, with half the board blaming malware and the other yelling about Chinese hackers. That was when he repeated the question—this time meant not in anger, but awe.
Who ARE you?
There was a long pause while he waited for an answer—but it never came.
One moment, she was beside him.
The next, she was gone.
* * *
Cameron blinks, noticing the dryness of his eyes as he stares at the empty landscape where his avatar now stands alone. He’s never been so lost in a game before; he’s been sitting in the same position for so long that he can’t tell anymore where the couch ends and his butt begins. Both his knees crack loudly as he stretches, blood flowing uncomfortably back into the parts of his body that had gone numb. Also, he has to pee more desperately than he ever has in his life.
Outside, the sun has gone down, and Cameron realizes with surprise that it’s ten o’clock—and that he’s exhausted, in the same deep and satisfying way that used to come after he’d spent all day on the Sunfish, chasing changeable winds across the lake. He could fall asleep right here, right now, and not open his eyes again until morning . . . if not for the frustration of that unanswered question still hanging there on screen. Had he scared her away? Pissed her off? Or was the problem some third-party issue, a throttled connection in response to all that bandwidth they’d been hogging with their battle royale? He closes his eyes and concentrates on the game. He can sense hundreds of players out there, even the ones who aren’t active; their presence creates little ripples of data, the same way someone hiding in a dark room might breathe or shift his weight, making minute disturbances in the air. But not her. He can’t even see the trail where she backed out of the system. It’s like she simply winked out of existence, dropping off the network in one fell swoop. The suddenness of her departure makes him uneasy, but there’s nothing to be done. She’s gone. He sighs, and the screen goes dark.
That’s when he sees it. His phone, forgotten on the table beside him, is still glowing—illuminated by a single notification blazing in the middle of the screen. In his single-minded focus on the mysterious second player and their strange, instantaneous connection, he never even noticed it. Now his breath catches in his throat as he realizes: before the girl left, she sent a message. Four simple words, but holding so much promise:
NIA WANTS TO CONNECT.
7
A New Beginning
Nia is the one who changes everything. It’s thanks to her that he finally understands: he doesn’t have to resist his gifts. They talk every day for the week following that first amazing meeting, the battle royale that left him breathless and staring with cautious excitement at her message, glowing in the dark of the room. At first, he’d been suspicious, half convinced that the whole thing would turn out to be an elaborate catfish, that he was being punked by someone like Archer Philips—or maybe being surveilled by the government, although he couldn’t imagine why. He hasn’t breathed a word about his abilities to anyone, and he won’t. It’s a line he won’t cross; it’s too dangerous. But even if nobody was after him specifically . . . well, people lie about their identities online all the time. Some skepticism was definitely in order, and Nia’s internet presence only added to the mystery: in addition to being some kind of superhacker, she was an active poster on multiple networks, with hundreds of thousands of friends and connections. But when he tried to pull back the curtain and find the real-life girl behind the screen, he came up empty—and embarrassed. He was attempting to trace her IP address when his phone buzzed with a new message.
It’s rude to snoop.
Even as Cameron’s cheeks burned with embarrassment, he couldn’t help being impressed—and more intrigued than ever.
And ultimately, his fears were all unfounded. Nia is utterly, one hundred percent real. Not just the gaming and hacking part—from that first night that they’d torn through the system together, he never doubted that he was in the presence of greatness—but the part where she’s a girl? Yep. And hot? Oh, yeah.
When they meet face-to-face for the first time on video chat, Cameron is immediately embarrassed that he ever doubted her. There’s no question that she is who she says: seventeen years old, wickedly smart, and intimidatingly gorgeous in a way that makes Cameron instantly self-conscious about his messy hair and the scar on his temple. But if she’s disappointed, she doesn’t show it. Actually, she seems nervous.
“I can’t talk long,” she says. “If Father catches me chatting with you . . .”
“Let me guess,” Cameron said. “He’s one of those crazy paranoiacs who thinks that everyone on the internet is a serial killer or a pedophile.”
Nia smiles. “Something like that. He would ask too many questions.”
“I’m good with parents. You could introduce me—” Cameron begins, but Nia’s eyes go wide.
“Oh, no. I—No. Cameron, I�
�m sorry. I have to go.”
The screen goes blank.
Cameron feels disappointed—the whole exchange was over in barely a minute—but also a little relieved. Having to look at Nia while he talked to her was distracting; it made him nervous and tongue-tied, not to mention embarrassingly, visibly sweaty. But over text, or in avatar form, he feels none of that pressure; he can be suave, witty, even a bit of a flirt. In virtual space, there is no awkwardness. Their messages fly back and forth unencumbered by real-life self-consciousness, and their conversations are the best part of his day. Nobody is easier to talk to than Nia, and nobody understands him better—not even Dr. Kapur, whose entire job it is to interpret his feelings. Nia gets it. When the world makes him angry and frustrated, she’s the only one who seems to truly grasp what he’s talking about. He messages her that night.