by Rae Mariz
It was surreal.
The video finished with the words, “We refuse to choose our suicide.”
Everyone sat there quietly for a moment.
Then Rocket asked, “So do you think this green would work?” She held up a skein of yarn.
“I saw a beige in the basket over there that could work for the elbow patches,” Ari said helpfully.
That was all they had to say?
“So was that supposed to be a kind of protest?” I blurted out.
“What do you mean?” Kasi said, distracted.
“I don’t know. That message seemed really antisponsor, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Rocket said.
“‘The Unidentified.’ I don’t get it,” Avery said, leaning back on the sofa. “What’s wrong with having an identity? About liking what you like?”
“I know, right? How can they be, like, antichoices?” one of the Craftster-wannabes piped up, ready to voice her opinion now that she knew what everyone else thought. “They’re, like, enemies to democracy or something.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Aren’t the Craftsters supposed to be against consumer culture, too? All that handmade, DIY, fight-the-Fascists stuff?”
I looked over at Avery, the diamond-studded image of Che Guevara on her red T-shirt stretched wide across her sizable breasts. She rolled her eyes.
“I’m not defending what they did, I’m just trying to understand—”
“Kid…” Ari began, but then just shook the hair out of her face and sighed dramatically.
No one was going to say I was wrong, but everyone seemed to think I needed to shut up. I guess that’s why I wasn’t Miss Popularity or even Miss Congeniality. I was like the runner-up to Miss Mediocrity, and my prize was awkward silence.
The Fashion Fascists decided to use the distraction of my social suicide to execute a raid on the Flirt16 magazines and a bitch fest broke out.
“Hey! I was looking at that, you slut,” Avery called after them. Avery was always ready for a fight.
“Right, like you could ever pull off that look with all that junk in your trunk,” Quelly sniped.
“She’s, like, smuggling cottage cheese.”
The Fascists shrieked with laughter as they carried the yoinked look-books back to their side of the room.
“Like, ten pounds of the generic store-brand stuff!” Ashleah Carter called out.
The Craftsters huddled in around Avery to plan retaliatory attacks. It involved arming themselves with lipstick and covertly marking the backs of Fascists’ skirts and jeans in strategic areas.
I was just about to close my notebook® and clear out before metaphorical blood was shed, but first I linked to the Unidentified film from my page. I wanted Mikey to see this, and I trusted him to show the apropriate amount of curiosity for the stunt.
Besides, Winterson just told me I needed to start showing more interests on Network, and this was the most interesting thing I’d ever seen happen in the Game.
5 WIRED
I left the Sweatshop feeling…I didn’t know. I felt more like a sound, hollow like wind whooshing. I pulled out my intouch® and thumbed in:
kidzero: is free-falling. catch me.
It was always so much easier to know what I was feeling when I had to put it into words, or more accurately, under one hundred characters, and send it off into the world.
The Unidentified video was still bugging me. Or maybe it wasn’t even the video, maybe it was the response to the video that bugged me. The lack of response. People in school were tossing bodies over the edge and no one cared enough to figure out why.
I watched my message get pushed to the bottom of the tiny screen by all the incoming sponsor messages. It made me feel better. How could a person stumble down into an empty void when the place was filled with so much fun stuff?
#spons: the Studio is available for sign-up.
The Studio, part of the music center, was on the other end of the fourth floor. I started down the hall still cradling my purring intouch® and put out a call to Mikey.
kidzero: what doing? @MIKEY
Judging by his reply, Mikey was playing a simulation game in the Arcade.
mikes: is collapsing the global economy. wee!
This was followed quickly by a comment from Jeremy Swift.
swiftx: is annoyed by incompetent day traders @MIKEY
I laughed and got in on the discussion.
kidzero: ha! swift thinks you’re a merchant banker=wanker @MIKEY
Then I immediately felt like I got caught looking. It was so rude to reply to personal conversations like that. But I was probably safe; Jeremy wouldn’t be able to see my comment unless I directed it @ him, or if he was following my stream. And I seriously doubted Jeremy Swift would ever subscribe to my stream.
I didn’t follow too many streams, just the few friends I had on Network. I followed Swift’s because he was a friend of Mikey’s, otherwise he was completely out of my social orbit. He had like three thousand friends because he was branded and a big-shot War Gamer and seminotorious Crackhead programmer. I had like eleven. Pathetic, but true.
The fact that Swift just shouted out Mikey in his stream was probably going to result in a surge of subscribers to Mikey’s stream. Now that I commented on their convo, Mikey probably thought I was one of Swift’s stream-groupies too.
Stream-groupies subscribed to all the high-score players and branded kids’ streams to get in on the gossip flow. Ari was a total stream-groupie. I didn’t know how she did it. I could barely keep up with the handful of friends I follow, and the #spons messages, and the Game PLAYs.
Besides, it didn’t feel right to clutter up my intouch® with the opinions of people like Eva Bloom or Palmer Phillips. I really didn’t care what they thought, even if they were branded.
I was starting to angst about buttoning into the convo when Mikey responded.
mikes: we’re playing buy sell & destroy on 5! come! @KID
I smiled and continued up the escalator. To my surprise, Jeremy replied.
swiftx: who’re you talking to? @MIKEY
Now it was painfully obvious that he wasn’t subscribed to my stream. I felt so invisible.
mikes: kid. @SWIFT
swiftx: yeah, come log him off b4 he crashes banking system @KID
My breath kind of caught in my throat. Jeremy Swift sent a reply directly to me. I imagined that my intouch® purred louder when he wrote to me, that the weight of his popularity shook my machine more.
Just as I got to the entrance of the Arcade, my intouch® chirped. It meant that I got a new PLAY clue, an assignment I needed to do for Game score.
PLAY: In what year did paper cease to be produced from tree pulp? text back before close of Game for time bonus.
I hesitated for a nanosecond. I thought it must have been a trick question. Everyone knew paper was made from a reusable plastic resin, printed ink washed from it with a chemical solution and saved for a new print run. A paper made from trees? That must’ve been back in the Wood Ages.
I usually jumped on all the Game clues to get the time bonuses, but I wasn’t even sure which floor I needed to explore to find the answer to this one, and…I really couldn’t even fake an interest in USian history right now. Mikey wanted me in the Arcade. And so did Swift?
I swiped my card at the entrance to the Arcade and went in. All the strobe glows of hundreds of screens flashed strange shadows on the dark, cavelike walls. I listened to the hushed music of the Arcade. The tinny sound of explosions escaping through headsets. A symphony of trigger-clicking, button tapping…crescendoing into an outburst of expletive, a cry of triumph. Kids sat across from one another in these long rows of desks, with LCD monitors stretched down the middle. But the monitors blocked the view of the other person, and reflected back a window into their own private virtual worlds.
There were no available ports, so I was put in the queue. I went over to the Tech Support Desk to see how long the wait was. El
le Rodriguez, the Save the Princess team captain, was manning the desk. She was typing ridiculously fast, her silver-painted fingernails flashing. The text on her screen reflected in her pink-tinted glare-resistant glasses.
She saw me and smiled. “Hey, you’re Tesla’s friend, right?—Kid, hi—Problems logging on?—The server’s got attitude today—Oh, you’re on standby, cool—Something should open up soon, or I could bump this perv, he’s been on since we opened—Whoa! You’ve got, like, three weeks worth of hours stored up!—Don’t tell anyone, but there’s a black market for excess hours. You could make bank.”
She had already accessed my account information and found the answers to her questions before I could give them. She talked as fast as she typed.
I just stood there kind of dazed as she started to ramble on about the protocol of hours auctions and the zen of troubleshooting.
“How do you even have so many hours saved up? What’re you, a monk?” Elle laughed.
I just shrugged. No one ever really understood when I told them I wasn’t interested in staring into screens, especially not the SimKids who hung out in the Arcade, so I’d given up trying to explain it. Not that I really knew how to explain it. I just felt like I needed to spend my time doing something real.
Mikey bounced up and practically tackled me from behind.
“You can squeeze in with me and Swift,” he said, out of breath.
I scanned the room looking for Jeremy’s mop of dark hair. He was staring intensely at a screen, his broad shoulders tense beneath his trademark black T-shirt. A small crowd of point-gawkers gathered behind him, watching him play.
“Hey, are you guys coming to the War Game?” Elle asked.
“We’ll be there.”
“Awesome.” She looked at Mikey, and squinted. “You’re a meatpounder, aren’t you?”
I laughed. Mikey looked horrified.
“No! I…I like girls.”
“I’m just messing with you. Swift’s a friend of mine, too. It’s going to be a great game.”
We waved good-bye and left her desk.
“I think she likes you,” I teased Mikey.
His ears turned red. It wasn’t outside of the realm of possibility that a girl like Elle would hit on Mikey. If you didn’t mind your guys being made up entirely of elbows and Adam’s apples, Mikey was pretty cute.
“Not interested,” he mumbled.
“Come on, she wants your meat.”
It looked like he was preparing a witty comeback, but the time for that had already passed.
I just laughed at him, and we walked over to Jeremy and his entourage. The girls hovering over his shoulder glared at me as I squeezed in beside Mikey, who reclaimed the empty seat by Jeremy.
“What are you guys playing?” I asked, looking at Mikey’s screen.
“Jeremy cracked a version of Buy, Sell & Destroy. It’s this game where you’re a hot-shit investment banker that goes around crippling economies, exploiting disaster, and projecting profits, all while snorting lines of credit and living luxe. Wanna play?”
I just said, “Nah, I’m not interested in finance.”
“You’re not supposed to cripple economies,” Jeremy mumbled. “You’re supposed to make profits. You start out as a trader in the pit at the New York Stock Exchange. Then you build up your fortune and work your way up the financial ladder with speculative investments, innovative schemes, and backroom dealings without getting caught.”
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a pulsing ball in the corner of the screen.
“It’s a kind of stress meter,” Mikey said. “You can get an ulcer, heart attack, or aneurysm if you don’t watch it. Bills pile up, demands from your wife, criminal investigations into your firm, all this stuff adds stress.”
I looked at Mikey’s stress meter. It looked pink and happy.
“You don’t seem too stressed-out.”
“Nah, I don’t give a shit.” Mikey laughed and made his avatar try to climb out of the Pit.
I looked back to Jeremy’s screen. His stress meter was ballooning.
“Ah! Look out! Your stress levels are going from like red to purple? It looks…bad.”
“Yeah,” Jeremy said, flicking his eyes to me for a millisecond. “But it’s OK, my shift is almost done. After work, I’ll get drunk and boink an intern. It’s the fastest way to reduce stress.”
“That’s effed up,” I said. The girls behind Jeremy giggled nervously.
“Mikey!” Jeremy yelled. “Learn to play or log out of the game! Your renegade trading is making investors lose confidence in the system.”
“I know how to play,” Mikey said, clicking absentmindedly on a button.
“What did you do?” Jeremy snapped.
“What? Nothing.”
“Mikey! What did you do?”
“I just sold all my stocks.”
“Well, stop it. You’re causing a panic. Now everyone’s dropping their stocks. This is the cracked interactive version, and you’re effing up my game! Do you know how long it took me to inflate the value on those stocks?”
“This is boring,” Mikey complained.
I watched Jeremy, his attention still focused on the game. He bit his lip and squinted his eyes. I felt a little thrill to be this close to him.
I daydreamed for a moment, imagining him being as interested in me as he was in the game. Then I noticed Mikey staring at me, and felt like I just got caught looking at puppy porn.
I attempted to cover up my embarrassment by searching through my bag, wishing I could crawl inside it.
“Mikey, shit,” I said, remembering something he’d find more interesting than my awkward infatuation. “There’s something I wanted to show you.” I took my notebook® out of my bag and opened it. “Did you see this?”
I pulled up the Unidentified film from my page and played it for him.
The people who had been watching the legendary Swift play video games gathered behind me to peek at the film too. I wondered how Jeremy could stand people hovering around him like that.
I glanced back at Jeremy. I caught him looking at me. His rain-cloudy eyes seemed to see me for the first time. It made me hyper-self-conscious.
I turned back to the film.
Mikey frowned, still watching the screen. He watched the splatter. The crowd shot. Me on-screen.
“That was kind of intense,” Mikey said at last. “Are you OK? How was it…you know, being there?”
Mikey really surprised me sometimes. He could be totally, completely, stupidly insensitive, but then he could be the most sensitive. He was the only one who ever asked me how I felt and actually seemed to care about the answer.
“I’m OK. It wasn’t real.”
He looked back at the screen. “Yeah, but I bet it felt real.”
6 LOOK AND LISTEN
Mikey and me logged out of the Arcade and squinted at the light streaming in from the skylight. The sky felt so close when you were up here on the fifth floor. We leaned against the railing where the dummy had been pushed.
“I can’t believe someone would be vred enough to drop a body in the middle of the Game,” Mikey said, looking down into the Pit, leaning over the railing a little. He stood on one foot, stretched his arms out, ready for a Superman whoosh into the air below. “You think they’ll get caught?”
“I saw who did it,” I blurted out.
“Wow, you’re terrible at this. You’re supposed to build up suspense before the reveal. I know your Media Literacy scores are low, but I thought you’d at least—”
“I’m not playing. I saw them.”
“What?”
“Well, I didn’t see who it was, but I saw them do it. There were two of them, or maybe more, now I don’t remember what I saw.”
Mikey was quiet for a moment, then he said, “I can’t believe you actually saw it happen. I’m so jealous.”
“What do you mean?”
“How often is there a glitch in the Game? When something completely u
nprogrammed and unexpected happens?”
“Ari thought the sponsors did it,” I said. “And the Craftsters were more interested in the look than the action.”
“Your friends lack imagination,” Mikey joked. “There’s no way the sponsors came up with it.”
“How do you know?” I asked, but I already knew the answer too. I knew it from the second I saw the body tip over the edge. I felt it. The ache of an authentic moment. The real thing.
“The sponsors can only wish they could come up with something that cool.” Mikey laughed.
“Did you see my souvenir?” I said, holding up my balloon-face wristwatch.
“Good game,” he said. “But is it wise to walk around with crime-scene evidence strapped to your arm?”
Could I get in trouble for picking up a piece of trash? Was anyone even looking for who was responsible? I mean, besides us.
“Look,” I said, pointing up at the telltale spy boxes, red recording lights lazily blinking. “Looks like whoever did it is not going to get caught. At least, not caught on film.”
All the old surveillance cameras, reminders of the building’s less-tech life as a mall, had been posed and repositioned in new angles. Instead of focusing on the passages and the Pit, they were pointing at each other in playfully paranoid staring contests.
I never really noticed the cameras before. They had always been part of the architecture, background scenery, but now it looked like they were creating some center-stage drama.
Two cameras in particular were angled toward each other so delicately that they almost looked intimate. Like lovers sharing a secret, whispering that they only had eyes for each other.
“Cute,” I said and took an intouch® snapshot of the private moment. There was something so creepy-sweet about it. Surveillance cameras in love. Stalker romance. “You want to see if there’s still time available in the Studio?” I asked Mikey while saving the photo.
I was playing back the drum track Mikey had just laid down. He was so good. I’d told him about the bird-wing beats I’d noticed in the Pit, and he captured the syncopated speed perfectly. It was just a snare drum rhythm, but it flew forward in my headphones. I listened not only to what we had recorded, but to the sounds that were missing. The sounds I