Flag Race

by Felipe Valente

  Pedro opened his eyes, about to say that was ridiculous, but then he realized he was now really wearing his favorite red shirt, jeans, and sneakers.

  Baffled, he spent a few more seconds checking himself.

  “That’s more like it!” She took his hand. “I’m Kerah, nice to meet you.”

  “Pedro,” he said, smiling as he greeted her.

  “Ah! That’s your real name, right? You’d better use another here. Nobody feels comfortable with their own name and usually people don’t want to know who it is they’re talking to in ‘real’ life.” She made air quotes with her fingers.

  “Besides,” she went on, “you wouldn’t want to be yourself. I mean, do you really think I’m this smoking hot redhead out there? Everybody on the Neuralnet likes their anonymity. Nobody knows who you are, what your name is, what you look like, how old you are, or where you come from. Here we all only speak the same language because we’re using the computer’s language—or something like that.”

  Pedro frowned, absorbing all the new info and wondering what he’d do with it. Who would he like to be? What would he want to look like? He thought about the infinite possibilities ahead. A few minutes ago he was just a boy turning sixteen. Now he had the power to be whoever he wanted. Taller? Sure. Thinner? No problem. Straighter hair? Why not?

  Kerah took a few steps back to give him the freedom to think. Pedro tried to clear his mind for a few moments and focus on how he’d like to look. At first he figured he wouldn’t like to become someone totally different. The idea still hadn’t sunken in enough for him to feel as if he wouldn’t hurt his identity by changing himself over completely.

  Therefore, he started with small changes. Made his nose smaller. Arched his eyebrows a bit more. Made his muscles bigger. Cut some of the fat. If only my PE teacher could see me now! And it was so easy!

  A few minutes later he was satisfied with his new version of himself. He noticed, a bit ashamed, that he’d changed several more of his features after getting the hang of it, and he was now a person who retained only a few residual aspects from the original Pedro, especially in his facial expressions. At least I’m not an elf or a four-armed man or something, he thought.

  To cap it all, Pedro changed his wardrobe again. He decided on a light futuristic suit of armor, dark-colored with silvery ornaments. He was surprised to see how easy it was for him to perfectly recreate the armor from the main character of Star Effect.

  Satisfied, he decided he should rename himself accordingly: “Call me Ace!” They shook hands again.

  “Now, that’s more like it! Nice! Not too flashy!”

  “Wow, Kerah, thank you so much for your help! I’d still be lost here if it wasn’t for you. I don’t know how much longer it would have taken me to get all this by myself or with that weird little bot in the white world.”

  “Don’t mention it! I feel good helping. Besides, I have some ulterior motives!” She laughed.

  Ace grimaced and lifted an eyebrow. Of course, a part of him liked that a gorgeous redhead should have certain ulterior motives regarding him. On the other hand, he was also afraid of what he could be demanded to pay for all the tips she’d given him.

  “Don’t worry.” She gave him a friendly smile. And, as if she could read his thoughts, she added, “You don’t owe me a thing, and you won’t need to stay with us if you don’t want to.”

  “Us?”

  “Come with me!”

  She started moving to one of the corners in the square. They had to dodge people in dark robes who were shooting colorful beams at each other out of their magic wands.

  “Can’t they hurt each other? I mean, is that possible here?”

  “Not the way we usually understand, no. I’ll explain it to you later, but first you must understand nothing here can hurt you in real life. And here, in a HUB, we’re prevented by programming laws from doing damage to each other, no matter what. Here!”

  Kerah quickly pointed her rifle at Ace’s head and pulled the trigger. He didn’t have time to react. Just squeezed his eyes shut in a silly instinctual gesture to protect himself.

  “See?”

  Ace opened his eyes and saw that the bullet fired at him was now on the ground, at his feet. While he ran his fingers over his forehead to check if he was really OK, she went on, “Here in the HUB neither I nor anyone else can hurt you. But in other loci, well, then rules may be different there... Ah, there he is!”

  They were passing a few trees by the park’s borders as Kerah pointed to a man in a green trench coat sitting on a chair by a French-style café. The man appeared to be in his twenties, despite the straight white hair that covered the top of his forehead. He carried something on his back that to Ace looked like a large sword in a scabbard. They drew closer.

  “Kerah! My girl!”

  “Get out, Dante! I know all women are ‘your girls,’” she mocked him with a silly voice, laughing. “You can work on your flirting later. Look here: I may have found someone for our team.” She pointed at Ace with her thumb.

  Ace lifted his right hand in greeting, still intrigued. Team?

  “Hey! ’Sup, kid? Welcome to the universe of all wonders! Nice to meet you!” He stood and backflipped toward Ace, made a sweeping gesture with his open coat, and greeted him. “You may call me Dante.”

  “Pedr... Ace. You can call me Ace.”

  “Hm, and what is it you saw about him, Kerah?”

  “Look at his Neurolink.”

  They all looked at the device on Ace’s wrist. He tried to see if there was anything different about it, but failed. To his eyes, the Neurolink was the same as it was a few minutes ago. He quickly glanced at Kerah’s and Dante’s. They looked just like his. They merely had a bit less brightness on their displays, from what he could see.

  “He’s just created all the clothes he’s wearing,” Kerah said. “He’s also just changed his physique and, well, bear in mind this is the first time he’s come to the HUB.”

  Dante arched his brows, astonished.

  “Wow, kid! How about that? Not everyone can do something like this! Sweet!” Seeing Ace’s embarrassed—and confused—smile, he added, “Let’s sit here awhile so we can talk a bit more.”

  The chairs at the table where Dante was just sitting moved as if by magic, opening room for three. Ace sat down, still suspicious. As soon as everybody was in their places, Dante starting talking again. “OK, man, so here we go. From the beginning. Kerah must have explained to you that here we can do practically anything, right?”

  Ace nodded in confirmation.

  “The thing is, all that comes with a price. And here on the Neuralnet the price is your stability.”

  “My what?”

  “Your stability,” Kerah confirmed. “For some reason, our brains aren’t able to accept our powers here on the Neuralnet with ease. The more you alter the virtual world, the faster your stability drops. To make you understand it a bit better, just will your Neurolink to show you the percentile values, the same way you did with your clothes.”

  Ace did as requested and soon could see that, despite the fact that the shape and brightness of his Neurolink stayed the same, he could now see clearly on its display. “97%?”

  Dante and Kerah smiled, as if they knew it should be something around that. Dante went on. “This value gives you an idea of how much longer your brain can keep you here on the Neuralnet. That value will always drop with time, but it drops much faster when you change a lot of things.” He stretched back his arm, pointing at the square. “Those people who took the shape of dinosaurs, for instance, their stability must already be around 50% or less by now.”

  “And it’s not only what you do to your body,” Kerah added. “You know those wizards we passed by just now, shooting all those spells? Each spell costs a bit of your stability. Even the shot I fired on you cost me a bit of mine.”

  “Right, but what happens when it gets to zero?” Ace asked, worried.

  “You’re instantly logged out, k
id,” Dante replied, “and you wake up with a god-awful headache. They say it’s bad for you to let it happen too many times, but it doesn’t seem too serious.”

  Kerah added in a lower voice, “I heard that it can make you stop dreaming for a while too.”

  “Don’t think about it too much, Ace,” Dante said, noticing the concern in the boy’s eyes. “If you’re careful, you’ll always log out before your stability drops below 5%, and then there’s no problem. Just remember this: it’ll always be dropping. Stability also depends on how your body is in the world out there. If you’re sleepy or hungry, for instance, it’ll drop extra fast.”

  They went silent for a few moments. Ace pondered on what he’d just heard. It didn’t seem right to him that one should be forced to log out only when their stability hit zero. Weren’t there laws about it? Something that prevented people from doing harm to themselves?

  “Why don’t they force you to log out when it reaches, like, 5%?”

  Kerah inclined her head. “Because all forced disconnections are the same as logging out at zero percent stability. Actually, they made that law to keep people from wandering longer on the Neuralnet at zero.”

  Ace was quiet for a few more seconds, before he remembered what he wanted to ask. “And why were you so excited about my stability?”

  “Few people can create a decent avatar from the get-go on their first access and still keep all that stability. Nobody is sure why that difference exists, but I bet it has something to do with how each person’s mind is open to ideas that are different from what they see every day. I think that the more creative you are, the easier it is for your mind to accept what we do here.”

  Ace merely smiled, contemplating this. He remembered how he and his friends were always creating fantastic stories and characters and how their minds should already be used to all types of magic and technology.

  Kerah went on. “Besides, it depends a lot on how determined you are. The more you focus on a goal and concentrate in the virtual world, the slower your stability drops.”

  “The thing is, yours really dropped very little,” Dante remarked, “even though it’s your first access! That’s why Kerah wanted you to come here to chat with us. We wanted to know if you’d like to be part of our team.”

  “I heard you guys talking about it. What team?”

  Kerah and Dante smiled before they answered in a single voice, “Our Flag Race team!”

  Chapter 02

  “Flag Race?” Ace lifted an eyebrow, smiling.

  Dante nodded slowly in confirmation. “Just sync up your Neurolink with mine.” Ace started opening his mouth to question it, but he was silenced with a gesture. “Get used to not having to ask how you do things here. All you gotta do is will it and you’ll get it.”

  Exactly as Dante had said, all it took for Ace was willing to perform the suggested action for it to happen instantly.

  Kerah interrupted. “Oh, and while you’re at it, don’t forget to enable direct contact with us! Then, even if we’re at different loci, no matter how far, we’ll be able to talk as if we were side by side!”

  Ace quickly did as ordered.

  “Great! Now we can go straight to the Flag Race server locus and—”

  “Dante...” Kerah interrupted him.

  “What?”

  Kerah looked at Ace.

  “Even though his stability is still very high, I think we’ve given too much information already to our new friend for today. Besides, I don’t know if Ace has the time for chatting inline here with us. I know time on the Neuralnet runs slower than outside, but still it’ll take a while for us to explain everything to him.”

  Ace remembered where he was at home: his body sitting at the bed, probably looking like he was asleep. If my mother catches me like that, she’s gonna kill me! Noticing his concerns, Kerah went on, “Take it easy, Ace. You can go. We’ll chat some other time. Now that we’ve synced up our Neurolinks, whenever you’re inline, you’ll always be able to talk to us through your device. We’ll catch you again soon!”

  “But Kerah,” Dante interrupted, “what if he later—”

  “Enough, Dante. Let him go. It’ll only be worth it to get him on our team if he wants to join on his own.”

  Ace smiled. “Thanks, guys. See you another time.”

  He was holding back the urge to ask what he should do to log out. He figured again that the process probably involved the Neurolink. If it had been so easy to completely change his looks, logging out shouldn’t be any harder. Confirming his suspicions, it soon appeared on his display: “Are you sure you want to leave?”

  He logged out.

  Again that strange sensation of falling backwards came over him. He leaped awake, as if he’d just returned from a nightmare. It took him a few seconds to recall where he was. Sitting on several pieces of gift wrap littering his bed, he should have immediately remembered that he was at home, on his birthday, but even this glaringly obvious fact took a while to enter his mind, so immense had been the shock from traveling between the two realities.

  Sounds could be heard downstairs, of his mother doing the dishes and his brothers still yelling as they ran around. He looked at the clock on the wall. He’d spent little more than ten minutes on the Neuralnet, though he could swear he’d been in the virtual world for much longer. He thanked fate that neither his parents nor his brothers had come up to him and found him prone on his bed. Surely his parents wouldn’t accept very well the idea of a wristwatch that sticks a needle in your blood and puts you to sleep for hours while you have vivid dreams.

  He put the Neurolink away back in its box, hiding it in one of his drawers. He cleaned up a bit of the mess all the gifts and packages had left in his room and went downstairs, stopping right before the final steps when he heard his parents arguing.

  “We’ve got to do something, Antônio! We can’t go on watching our company going belly up and still do everything as before!”

  “I know, darling,” said Pedro’s father as he put away the dishes she’d washed, “but I don’t quite know what we could possibly do. I spoke to João and he said he’s going through a rough patch as well. There are tons of small marketing companies going under everywhere, and then...” He paused, putting his hand on his dark forehead. “Marta, you know we’re up to our necks here... The bank is already on our—”

  “To hell with the bank! We’ll pay when we can afford it! We’ll find a way, Antônio, I know we will. But we’ve got to do something! We have three children to raise and we’ve always done the right thing up till now! It was an uphill battle for us to give them the best we could, but we’ve always found a way!” She sighed. “We just have to be creative. And that’s something we’re good at, my love.”

  “Yeah, darling, but if we don’t find a way to get creative soon, then... well, never mind. Have you seen Pedro since the party?” He turned around to the staircase and yelled, “Pedro! Son, could you put your gifts down for a minute and come down here to talk to us?”

  Pedro waited enough time, he thought, for his father to believe he’d just come down the stairs all the way before finally going down the final steps.

  “Hey, Dad! Did you call me?”

  They talked about the party, about Grandma’s cake, wonderful as always, and the gifts he got. Pedro hid from them the fact that he’d been given a Neurolink, talking more about the other gifts, especially the book they’d bought for him.

  Pedro knew he shouldn’t stick his nose into his folks’ affairs. It was agonizing to think that the household’s financial situation wasn’t all right, but he knew it wouldn’t help a thing to get involved in the discussion. He was hoping their situation would soon change so his parents wouldn’t need to come and tell him and his brothers straight up that they were about to go bankrupt.

  Lying in bed hours later, Pedro tried to recall what he’d heard so far about the Neuralnet. He believed he’d heard his friends say something about it some time ago, but he hadn’t really paid much atte
ntion to it. Out of all the things they’d talked about back then, such an idea seemed too unreal and alien to their reality.

  It came to him that he’d seen some news reports about the beginning of a new, more intuitive Internet, with countless new possibilities, that was about to be available to users, but he’d never even dreamed he could really enter a virtual world and manipulate it at his will.

  At the same time, he couldn’t help but wonder when he would be able to access that fantastic universe once again (to “go inline,” as Kerah had said) without owing his family some explanations. He didn’t want his parents to keep him from accessing the Neuralnet as a protective measure until everything about it was sorted out. He could almost hear his father ranting about how, even though they already had the Internet back then, he’d grown up playing hide and seek, tag, and cops and robbers with his friends, and how that was much healthier for a human being.

  His brothers pestering him to use his Neurolink was something else he didn’t want. Pedro didn’t even know whether this was actually possible—maybe this Neurolink was now really just his own and nobody else’s—but he was afraid they could break his only means of entry into the virtual world.

  Better wait, he thought, and gather some more information about the new Web. Surely one of his friends, Daniel or Luiz, would know something about the Neuralnet. Though he was excited to talk to Letícia about her gift, he was afraid he’d look foolish, asking her details from the Net that were probably trivial to her. But I’ll have to talk to her if I want to see her inline! he pondered. Fantasies regarding all sorts of adventures they could experience together in the virtual world entertained him until he fell asleep.

  The next day, after his father dropped him and his brothers off at school, he went through the halls crowded with students down to his classroom, after his friends. He was just entering the classroom when he heard his name.

  “Pedro!” Daniel yelled, walking up to him, followed by Luiz. “Man, I forgot to tell you yesterday! Did you see that Heroes XV is out already? Now you can play online with everybody, make alliances, send resources to your friend’s castle and...”