Slum Online

by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

  When your health dropped to zero anywhere outside the arena, the system forced you to log out. It was a feature designed to keep the city from descending into chaos with brawls on every street corner. When you logged back in, you had to go through the hassle of getting back to wherever you’d been. But this wasn’t enough to deter everyone. A faction of players decided that since it was a fighting game, they wanted to fight. They started wearing headbands and wristbands to identify themselves. Before long, the town was neatly divided into two groups, characters who chose to fight anytime, anywhere, and those who fought only in the arena. It was a little bit like gangs showing their colors. At a glance, you could tell where someone stood and know how to approach them.

  The white headband encircling Tetsuo’s head signaled that he was a top-tier fighter who would accept challenges anywhere in the game. The jujutsuka standing in front of him wore neither headband nor wristband. Unlike Tetsuo, he clearly had no interest in street fighting.

  > Of late, danger has come even here to Sanchōme. People have grown obsessed with farcical duels. Alas, I can scarcely scale a wall in peace.

  > I thought fighting was the whole point.

  > The point is what you make of it. I’ll not deny that many choose to make dueling that point, but dueling in and of itself has no more or less meaning than jumping walls.

  He had worked out quite a little philosophy for himself, but we were starting to stray off-topic.

  > I’m not here to duel. I’m looking for someone.

  The jujutsuka relaxed his stance.

  > And who might that be?

  > Have you heard about the snake boxer?

  > Snake boxer?

  > They say he hangs out somewhere around here.

  > This place teems with eagles and snakes. They’re two of the best schools, as you must surely know.

  > The snake I’m looking for is no ordinary snake.

  > An extraordinary snake, then?

  > Extraordinary enough to beat 963. One of the top four.

  > Ah, then it is Jack whom you seek.

  > Jack?

  > The shadow who stalks Sanchōme.

  > That’s the guy.

  > Here he is known as Ganker Jack.

  The jujutsuka folded his arms. The shadow of the wall that towered over us lay unmoving at our feet.

  The web of roads and alleyways grew more and more complex the further I went.

  After he had parted ways with the jujutsuka, Tetsuo had gone back toward the outskirts of Sanchōme. According to his new friend, there was a saloon in Versus Town where people went to swap stories about the comings and goings in the virtual city. If I wanted to hear more about Ganker Jack, he assured me, there was no surer place to go.

  I tilted the stick gently up and to the right. Tetsuo hopped over a log blocking the middle of the street. There was much more to Sanchōme than I had imagined. Houses, one very much like the next, lined long, winding streets. A passage that, at a distance, seemed nothing more than an alley barely wide enough for a person to pass could lead to vast, empty courtyards. And not a single character appeared to break the emptiness.

  I’d heard European cities from the Middle Ages were rife with blind alleys and dogleg roads. They actually designed the cities to be difficult to navigate as a defense against invasion. Sanchōme appeared to be built on the same premise. Its tangled skein of roads and byways seemed tailor-made to prevent the uninitiated from penetrating its veil. Each new road looked very much like the last. It was as though the saloon was not meant to be found.

  By the time I finally did find it, ten minutes had passed since I left the jujutsuka. Even coming straight from Itchōme it would probably take fifteen minutes to get here.

  Tetsuo stood in front of the bar. The place looked like something out of a spaghetti Western. The walls were covered with textures of weather-beaten wood. The only entrance was a pair of swinging doors. Nearby, a lone wooden barrel stood sentry. Above the entrance, an old sign rested atop two massive beams. The polygons of the sign were just crooked enough to draw attention to themselves. Unlike RL, in a virtual world you had to go out of your way to make anything that wasn’t perfectly parallel with everything else. JTS SALOON declared the sign in giant letters. The only thing missing was a good whinny sound FX.

  Tetsuo pushed the swinging doors open and peered in.

  Inside was murky and dim. Two characters stood in front of the bar, having a conversation. There were probably others further back in the room, but it was too dark to be sure. Maybe staring at the sunlit cityscape for so long just made the saloon seem darker than it was.

  I gave the stick two quick taps, then brought it back to neutral. Tetsuo speed-dashed into the saloon.

  > Howdy, pardner.

  The man who spoke was a heavyweight fighter behind the counter. The classic bartender.

  There was no concept of money in Versus Town. Unlike role-playing games, fighting games didn’t have rare items or experience points. So it surprised me to see a bartender controlled by a real person.

  One by one, the text bubbles over the heads of the other characters in the dim cavern of the bar faded. I could feel the eyes of everyone in the room move to Tetsuo. The characters were as still as statues. The textures that passed for their eyes stared blankly. But all across RL, over mile after mile of network cable, the players were watching every move of this newcomer on their television screens.

  Tetsuo turned toward the bartender.

  > I’m looking for someone.

  > This here’s a bar, son.

  > Huh?

  > You gotta order somethin’.

  > I don’t have any money.

  > Don’t need no money. So what’ll it be? We got whisky-and-water, bottled beer, and mineral water. Them’s the only three drinks on offer.

  > Gimme a mineral water, then.

  > Comin’ right up.

  The bartender slammed down the glass, generating a loud clink sound FX. I input a complex command and Tetsuo extended his hand above the counter. I had seen the command in the manual but never used it until now. Tetsuo failed to grasp the glass on his first two attempts. In the process, I managed to send the polygonal glass rolling along the countertop. The glass emitted a gravelly rumble sound FX as it moved, but not a drop of its contents spilled. Not so much as a ripple disturbed the surface of the transparent substance filling the glass. The water in Versus Town was just a mass of polygons rendered using matrix calculus. You could drop a crystal glass on the floor and it wouldn’t break.

  > You new?

  The woman had waited for Tetsuo to pick up the glass before approaching him.

  > I’ve had my account a little over a month.

  > This your first time here?

  > Yeah, you could say that.

  She was wearing a skin-tight purple suit with high heels to match. Her hair was long and black. A lightweight. Drunken fist. The sake bottle hanging from her hip clashed horribly with the suit, but if she hadn’t been made of polygons, she wouldn’t have looked half-bad.

  People said the person who played Keith, one of the top four, was actually some high school girl. But just because a character spoke like a woman didn’t necessarily mean the player was female. In fact, most of the time it probably wasn’t. The ratio of male-to-female accounts in Versus Town was nine-to-one.

  > I’m looking for someone. Maybe you’ve heard of him.

  > What’s his name?

  > Ganker Jack.

  > You too, huh?

  > There are other people looking for him?

  > Plenty.

  She gave an exaggerated shrug. The fact that she’d chosen to play a drunken fist spoke well of her skill. She continued.

  > Seems like everyone is talking about him these days. It’s getting a little old.

  > Do you know anyone who’s seen him?

  > Hard to say. I couldn’t care less, personally. Hashimoto’s the person to ask, but he isn’t here today.

  > Too bad.


  > It’s a pain in the ass is what it is. We haven’t seen 963 since Jack beat him, and the hardcore keep hanging around.

  > 963 used to come here?

  > Not just him. Pak and Keith drop by sometimes. Tanaka’s the only one of the top four who never comes. But he’s always been hardcore.

  > What’s all this hardcore stuff?

  > Just the way it sounds.

  Before she could continue, a man with long hair broke into the conversation.

  > You’re wasting your breath on that one, Masumi.

  He was wearing a light brown vest over a white shirt with a raised collar. An intricate pattern decorated his boots, which reached to just below his knees. His hair matched the color of his vest, and he wore it parted down the middle of his head. He was a middleweight snake boxer, and he had on a black wristband. A streetfighter like Tetsuo.

  He caught the leg of a nearby chair with a middle foot sweep, pulling it close enough for him to sit down and cross his legs.

  > Listen up, scrub. You wanna fight, you go down to the arena. You got no business here.

  A mischievous grin was plastered across his face. There were no commands to change your expression, so that meant wherever he went he wore the same ridiculous smile. Maybe he thought it made him look like some kind of twisted nihilist, but it looked pretty stupid to me.

  Tetsuo dropped into a fighting stance.

  > Who the hell do you think you are?

  > Ricky.

  > I’m

  > I don’t give a rat’s ass about the name of some scrub who does a speed dash inside a bar. Running indoors is for dogs and children too young to know better.

  > You looking for a fight?

  > I’d say I’m finding one.

  > Leave the new guy alone, Ricky.

  That last was Masumi, butting in.

  > That tournament’s bringing these guys out of the woodwork. I bet this one thinks he’s got the brass to take on the top four.

  > I’m just here looking for Jack.

  > To fight him, I know. You really want a fight, go to an arcade. You can find Pak out in Shinjuku.

  > At an arcade?

  > Don’t make me type it twice. A-R-C-A-D-E

  > That’s a little behind the times, isn’t it?

  > You just don’t get it, do you? Times may change, but holy ground is holy ground.

  Pak was the best player in Versus Town. In RL, he was an editor for a video game magazine. Even I had heard the stories about him showing up in arcades on Kokusai-dōri on the weekends. One of the many pilgrims to the “holy ground” that was the arcades of Shinjuku.

  But all that was a decade ago, long before the Internet had taken root. It used to be, people who lived in Mizuhodai could only play against other people who lived in Mizuhodai. If they didn’t like it, they could hop on a train to take them to Shinjuku. That was all well and good for people who lived in Mizuhodai.

  Saitama Prefecture wasn’t especially far from Tokyo. But if you lived in Hokkaido or Kyushu, it was a different story. There weren’t a lot of people who could afford to catch a bullet train to Tokyo just to ride out and play some games. Now, thanks to the Internet, the best players in the world were only as far away as your television. You could play your neighbor, you could play people in Hokkaido and Kyushu, you could even play people in the United States. Earth was a tiny place as far as the light pushing those packets back and forth was concerned. Nobody needed the rickety old arcade that shook every time the Tōbu Tōjō line passed by overhead anymore. This was the first time I’d heard anyone suggest that an arcade was the place you had to go if you were serious about playing. Why should anyone have to resort to going to a real city in RL to accomplish something you could do online?

  Ricky the snake boxer waved his hand. The gesture had already gotten on my nerves.

  > Pak never fights here.

  Ricky stood before continuing.

  > You’re not as good as you think. You think you’re some kind of wolf, a real leader of the pack. But you’re just another pig to the slaughter.

  > What did you call me?

  > You forget how to read? I said you were a pig.

  > You want to take this outside?

  > Thought you’d never ask.

  Tetsuo and Ricky walked out of the bar, one after the other. Behind them, I could see Masumi shrug one last time at the edge of the screen.

  We stood facing each other in the street in front of the saloon. Half the characters inside came spilling out through the swinging doors to watch the fight. It was Ricky who spoke.

  > Whenever you’re ready.

  The two characters stood exactly five steps apart.

  Snake boxing, or shéquán, is a Chinese martial art named for its trademark serpentine movements. When the developers were laying the foundation for Versus Town, they called in a famous Hong Kong movie star to do all the motion capture for the game. Apparently the guy had played a snake fist stylist in one of his movies. Along with eagle claw, it was one of the most powerful schools in the game.

  I counted slowly to three before inputting the speed-dash command. Tetsuo rushed forward and threw his fastest punch. Ricky dodged the punch with a crouching back dash. I pressed the A button to cancel out of the kick I’d already buffered. Move. Block. Tetsuo crouched as he moved forward and to the right, girding himself against low attacks. Ricky moved at an angle, tracking Tetsuo’s path. They spun 60 degrees, always facing each other.

  So long as he was crouching, high punches and kicks would sail right over Ricky’s head. You had to be able to reach your opponent’s back to throw him, so doing a kick-cancel throw was out too. Ricky had dodged Tetsuo’s punch in the most effective way possible. If Tetsuo had kept attacking, more likely than not he would have taken a counterhit.

  My knuckles whitened as they gripped the stick. Ricky made his move.

  His left hand darted forward in a middle punch. Cancel. Low kick. Back-dash to the left. Ricky swung 120 degrees to Tetsuo’s left. I had managed to dodge the middle punch, but the low kick hit home. Tetsuo’s health dropped by a fraction.

  I maneuvered Tetsuo forward and to the right, keeping Ricky directly in front of him. I launched a forward middle kick, but Ricky spun away back and to the left again.

  Tetsuo speed-dashed forward. As he ran in, Ricky caught him with a crouching punch. Another sliver off Tetsuo’s health. I backed him away. Tetsuo’s counterattack bit at air. While Tetsuo was recovering from the attack, Ricky moved in.

  I gave the command for a throw break. Ricky heaved Tetsuo onto his shoulder, just as I had expected. The throw break I’d already buffered sent Tetsuo somersaulting over Ricky’s head to land safely on the ground. Both characters back-dashed.

  Ricky would feint an approach, then back away, constantly circling Tetsuo. Tetsuo kept up his attacks, but they all seemed to fall just a few pixels short. Ricky was avoiding any decisive moves, favoring weak but reliable attacks instead. He was bleeding out Tetsuo’s health one drop at a time. Tetsuo specialized in midair combos initiated along with a counter, which put him at a disadvantage when facing an opponent who kept his guard up and played everything close to the vest. This was going to be a tough fight.

  A crowd of characters thronged the narrow space in front of the saloon. Row upon row of infinitely thin polygonal text bubbles floated in the air.

  > Kick his ass!

  > Don’t encourage them.

  > Picking on scrubs can’t be good for your karma.

  > Up with wolves, down with pigs!

  > Outta the way! I can’t see!

  > I think he fell asleep.

  > Who is this asshat, anyway?

  > Who cares? More fuel for the fire.

  > Good luck burning this place down.

  > I could teach you a thing or two.

  > Ugh, come on already!

  Bastards. They could type whatever they wanted. My hands were glued to the controls, and in this particular virtual world your hands w
ere your mouth. If you couldn’t reach your keyboard, you were a mute.

  Tetsuo advanced in silence. Ricky spun to the left. Tracking him as he moved, Tetsuo threw back-to-back punches—a left, then a right. Neither landed. Ricky dodged with a back dash. Instinctively, I canceled out of the second punch and did a speed dash. Ricky was still mid-move, and Tetsuo was right on top of him. Tetsuo made a low sweep kick. Knowing it would send Ricky tumbling to the ground, I buffered my next attack.

  Tetsuo’s kick never connected. One of the beams holding up the saloon sign blocked his foot. I hadn’t accounted for the terrain. Things like this didn’t happen in the arena.

  The impact left Tetsuo tottering off-balance. Ricky dashed forward and delivered a sharp open-palmed strike. The sound FX of the counterhit rang in my ears. Tetsuo’s body soared into the air.

  As Tetsuo hung suspended in the air, Ricky delivered one punch, then another. Canceling, he struck again with his elbow and followed up with a crouching punch. Tetsuo was on the ground now, but instead of pressing the attack, Ricky stepped back, putting some distance between them. Text bubbled over his head.

  > Quit foolin’ around.

  While he waited for Tetsuo to regain his feet, Ricky made a show of brushing the dust off his clothes. He still wore the same grin he’d had inside the saloon. Once that texture had been chosen, there was no going back without redesigning one’s whole character.

  The characters’ polygonal bodies moved with extreme fidelity. When they punched, they extended their arms and drew them back. When they kicked, the same was true of their legs. A hit that landed as a character was drawing in his arms or legs was considered a counter. Counters sent characters flying high into the air. Dealing massive damage to a character soaring helplessly across the screen was one of the core strategies of the game.

  Given split-second timing, people don’t have the luxury to think over what they’re going to do. Our bodies react on their own with the action they’re most familiar with. A conditioned reflex. To hone those reflexes, martial artists practice thousands of strikes a day, astronauts run through the same simulations over and over, and I practice my combos on the training dummy. There is no element of chance when you’re up against other players in a virtual world. A good player only wins as often as he deserves to win. I had proven that at the arcade in Shinjuku.