“You’re a patient in the hospital too?” I asked.
“Yeah, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I was in a car accident.” I paused, and then asked, “Have you seen a kid named Elon Lawrence? He would have come in the same time I did. About fifteen years old, dark skin, gray eyes?”
“I don’t think so,” Esme said. “How long ago?”
I realized I had been unconscious too many times to give an exact answer.
“I’m not sure, maybe a few days, maybe two weeks? We were both in the same accident.” I quickly told Esme what had happened, how a car had come out of nowhere to hit us straight-on, how there was nothing we could have done about it.
“Ouch!” Esme said. “Did the driver run a red light?”
My stomach twisted and I felt a little sick. I didn’t mention the part about the cell phone. I didn’t want to think about how maybe it was us who ran that red light.
“Anyhow, just let me know if you see him,” I said.
“Will do. One more thing, if you’ve only been here two weeks at most, how did you get the glasses so soon?” Esme asked. “They usually don’t hand them out until you’ve been here at least a month.”
“Some kid who came wandering into my room,” I explained. “He brought me my own pair.”
“It was probably A.J., right?”
“Yep. A.J.”
She nodded. “He’s our biggest recruiter. Always trying to get new people into the game so he can show off.” She shrugged again. “He’s a pretty sweet kid, though.”
“So how many people play inside the game?” I asked.
“Right now? It’s just the three of us,” she said. “I think.”
“You, me, and…”
“Anton.”
“Who’s that?”
“You’ll meet him soon enough.” She began to walk away toward the other end of the desert biome. I followed.
“So, what are you in for?” I asked.
“Chemo,” Esme said, as if she were replying to my question with her favorite color. “We’re hoping this round will be the one to kick the cancer out once and for all.”
“Wow, I hope it works too,” I mumbled. I felt like my words were totally lame and unhelpful. But I just didn’t know what to say to someone with that kind of news.
“It’s kind of my ultimate boss,” Esme said, shrugging.
She frowned. For a moment, her stare drifted as if she was thinking about something else. Then she refocused on me. “How long have you been in the game?” She seemed concerned.
“Not long,” I said. “It was night when A.J. came over to give me the goggles.”
“Did you come out? Was it still night when you came out?”
“I haven’t gone out yet,” I said. “I’m sure someone will take the goggles off me eventually.”
“So you haven’t made an exit portal yet?”
“A.J. was serious about that exit portal method?” She just stared at me, so I continued. “I’ll make it when I make it. I don’t see the rush.”
She stared me down and shook her head.
“This version of Minecraft is special,” Esme said. “The goggles are reading our brain synapses. You know what that is, don’t you? It’s not just about clicking some keys on a keyboard.”
“Yeah, I know what that is,” I lied.
“So when beginners come in who don’t know how to play the game, their thoughts can mess with the settings.”
“I’m not a noob,” I said sharply. “A.J. already told me stuff.”
“Yeah, yeah, well clearly he didn’t tell you everything. You’re not much for thinking things through, are you? Word of advice, you’re not ready. Log out, wait a few more weeks, and then the nice doctor will give you a pair of goggles and an instruction manual. Go back to your nice comfy hospital bed with the cartoon characters on the walls.”
“My room doesn’t look like that,” I said. “My room’s beige.”
Esme paused for a moment. “How bad is it that they didn’t even bother to put you in one of the rooms with the cartoon clowns?”
“Most of my body’s in a cast. I got wrecked big-time,” I replied. “That’s why I’m here. In the real world, I can’t move at all. And I can’t figure out what happened to my best friend.”
I felt an unexpected sob rising in my throat. I suddenly wanted to curl into a ball and cry about everything that had happened. I just didn’t want to do it in front of a stranger in Minecraft. Luckily, it didn’t seem like the avatars were that good at showing emotion. I quickly collected myself.
“So please, can you just show me around? I’m a fast learner, I promise.”
Esme was silent, her avatar standing still as she thought about it.
“Okay, fine, follow me and do as I do. We’re going to talk to Anton.”
I followed Esme through the desert biome, heading in what looked like no particular direction.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To Anton’s lair,” she said. “He and A.J. helped build a lot of the mods in this game. He can walk you through how to keep your brain from messing with the game.”
“What do you mean, ‘messing with the game’?” I asked.
Esme sighed, like she was talking to someone who was way dumber than she was.
“This version of Minecraft is manipulated with our brains…”
“Yeah, I got that part, loud and clear!” I snapped.
“It’s also a shared realm, so all our minds are playing in the same playground.”
“Okaaaay,” I said, trying to follow. “So?”
“So?! Think of it this way: Say you walked into a sandbox and didn’t know you had poop on your shoes. That just ruins the sandbox for everyone. Noobs who don’t know what they’re doing always have poop on their shoes. They didn’t mean to bring it in. They just don’t know to check their shoes.”
“Well, that’s why you’re helping me,” I pointed out. “I’ll check my shoes.”
She grunted. “For now.”
She continued to stomp through the sandy terrain, and I actually felt hot, most likely from anger and embarrassment. I mean, it wasn’t heat from the digital sun beaming down on our heads or anything.
“I should probably find something to eat,” I said.
Without stopping, Esme opened her chest and traded me some pork for nothing. My health level went up. I said, “Thanks,” but if she heard me, she didn’t let on. We walked in silence for a while, so I tried to restart the conversation. “I could go for a real pork chop right now. How about you?”
“I don’t eat much,” she said. “In the real world, I mean. Nausea.”
“From what?”
“Chemo makes me nauseated. Food, even the smell of food.” She went a little out of her way to mine over a dune. I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t, so I said, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. You didn’t know.” She stepped aside so I could take some of the redstone she had uncovered for myself.
“Thanks,” I said.
“So, what about you?” she asked. “Give me all the gnarly details.”
I tried to recall the long list of broken body parts Dr. Nay had recited when she was poking at my hologram.
“I’ve had a bunch of surgeries, and I’m probably going to be doing a bunch more,” I said, trying to sound like it wasn’t a big deal. Deep inside, my heart started pounding again. I hoped Esme couldn’t hear it. I wondered if they would be able to let me stay in Minecraft while all that was going on.
“Wait until you meet Anton,” Esme said, simply. “I bet he has you beat.”
“Huh?”
“No matter how many surgeries you’ve had or will have, none of them have been as awful as Anton’s brain surgeries,” she said, like it was a point o
f pride. She then switched from her mining pickaxe to her sword.
“I should get better weapons,” I said. “A.J. started me off with some pretty basic stuff.”
“Yes, that would be good,” she replied.
Over the next dune, there was a one-story house made of stone with glass and obsidian around the top, and a dense patchwork of cacti surrounding it except for a long path that led to the front door.
“Hold up,” Esme said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Traps,” Esme said. “Traps are Anton’s thing.” She moved forward, and I followed close behind. There were levers all along the sides of the path, and blocks of redstone, obsidian, lava, and TNT interspersed throughout. Exposed redstone wire joined them all together.
“It’s pretty long and complicated,” I said, actually impressed.
“If you don’t know where to step,” Esme said. She beckoned me with her hand, and I followed close behind, mimicking her jumps from one block to another, even when it seemed like I was going to a block that would blow up in my face. She went from an obsidian block on the left, jumping over to the other side of the path onto a sandstone block that looked like it had a trigger attached, but it didn’t go off. Next, she jumped onto a block of TNT, and turned back to say, “It’s a dud.” I nodded and followed. She moved off to the next block, more sandstone, jumped over some lava, and finally onto a short landing that led to the front door. I was relieved when I made it to the end of the treacherous path. Esme opened the door, and I jumped down, only not quite onto the landing that she’d just occupied.
There was an explosion. I turned back, and the entire gauntlet had been triggered in a cascade. Blocks exploded, lava erupted, and a series of sparks bloomed in front of my face.
“Get in!” Esme yelled. I stepped inside the house and she closed the door and backed away down a raised hallway as the lava burned at the front door, and seeped inside the room. I followed her up the steps to the hallway as the lava covered the entire floor.
“What the heck?” someone behind me said.
I turned around. A player in green came running from a back room toward us.
“What did you two do?” He ducked into a side room, and a moment later I could see him through the windows outside of the house. He went behind a cactus and fiddled with something, and the explosions stopped. He hesitated a moment, then went around looking at everything and shaking his head. By the time he had come back inside, the lava flow in the front room had receded to halfway across the floor.
“Who are you?” he asked, pointing at me.
“I’m Bianca,” I said.
“Bianca,” Esme repeated. “This is Anton.”
“Well, Bianca, you just ruined days’ worth of work,” Anton said.
“Sorry. It was an accident.”
“What did you bring her here for?” he asked Esme.
“It turns out—” she began.
“Jeez. Do you know how long it took me to do all of that? You can’t just grab up random kids from the ward and bring them over. You should ask first,” he snapped. “I’m not running a day care.”
“I’m not a little kid,” I said. But neither of them responded.
“First of all, I didn’t grab her up to bring her here,” Esme said flatly. “And second of all, she needs training.”
“Yeah, no joke,” Anton said, gesturing to the last of the lava and the ruined front door.
“A.J. dumped her in here before the doctors could talk about the program,” Esme continued. “She knows zilch about keeping her mind focused and uncluttered by the real world. She could mess up the game at any moment, rewrite our mods, just like Andrea!”
“Who’s Andrea?” I asked.
“Crap, you’re totally right.” Anton seemed to stare out at nothing, then mumbled, “Well, come along, let’s get you into a safer space so we can walk you through the basics.”
I didn’t much appreciate his tone, but what were my choices? Esme and I followed Anton through a sliding glass back door, and there was an arch. Well, the remnants of one. It looked like this was where he kept his permanent exit portal.
“The heck?” Anton said. He walked around the broken arch. The pieces hung in the air as if there was something holding them together, but there really was nothing at all. I was a little happy to see that they hadn’t been totally messing with me about needing a portal, but Anton looked pissed.
Anton moved from surveying his old portal to look at us, and stepped through the arch as if to make sure it really was ruined.
“This…is very bad.” He turned to me. “Did you do this?”
“What? No,” I said. “I just got here! I didn’t do anything at all!”
“Remember what I said about poop in the sandbox,” Esme said. “You may not know it, but your brain might have caused something in the game to mess up and break our portal.”
I didn’t know what to say. If I had messed something up, I didn’t know what it was. I tried to remember everything that had happened, to see if I’d stared at some command thing for too long by accident.
“I’m not sure exactly what happened,” I offered. “I had just gotten into the game, and I was exploring, then I met up with Lonnie, and then it was night and zombies showed up and—”
“Quiet,” Anton snapped. “Let me think for moment.”
We stood in silence, and after a while I asked, “So what’s with all the traps? I mean, it’s only a few kids in the game, right?”
Esme coughed, but it sounded suspiciously like a chuckle. “He has trust issues,” she said.
“Inside a game?” I asked.
“No, outside of the game,” she said. “His significant other is breaking up with him, and his parents are forcing him to play a sport he doesn’t even like, which he’s good at—”
“I was good at,” Anton interrupted.
“Which he is good at,” Esme continued.
“The point is, I rigged up my house because I knew I would have monsters mobbing it if I kept dwelling on the not-so-great real world stuff,” he said. “You don’t need to hear about that. Not now. There are other things we need to take care of.”
“Like what other things?” I asked.
“Like warning anybody else who’s come into the game since you got here,” Anton said.
“We should find Lonnie,” I said. “He’s in the game somewhere, but his avatar is messed up. He looks like a weird villager and he can’t talk. I last saw him in the forest biome.”
“What does he look like, exactly?” Anton asked.
“He has a blue shirt with a white cross on the chest.”
“I’ve never heard of a player porting into an NPC,” Anton said. “And I’ve been here since the beginning.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s not possible,” I said. That player had to be Lonnie. Didn’t Esme say that A.J. was a bit of a recruiter? “My friend was in the same accident that I was in. And he…yes, he was wearing a blue shirt then, too.”
“With a cross?” Anton asked.
I wasn’t sure. I blinked a couple of times trying to bring back the memory of what Lonnie had worn the night of the accident. I remembered the dark blue. And then there was his silver crucifix that he always wore. Was that the same as a white X?
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure.”
Esme and Anton looked at each other.
“Maybe his goggles are broken,” I continued, trying to think of ways Lonnie’s avatar could be acting up.
Esme and Anton shared another glance. Then Anton shrugged.
“It’s too early for theories,” Esme said. “All we know is that you saw him recently and that he was acting weird. Things inside the game don’t necessarily reflect things outside the game.”
“You’re right that we should look for him,” Anton said. �
�I want to see him for myself.”
“Good, then it’s decided. Let’s find Lonnie, fix his avatar, and then you can train us both in the ways of Minecraft mind control or whatever.”
I turned to head out, but Anton blocked my path. “Listen,” he said. “There’s more you should know. There’re uh…there’re some other possibilities to consider.”
“Like what?” I asked.
Esme moved forward. “Let’s just find the guy first, okay? There’s no need to scare her.”
“Just tell me already,” I said, exasperated.
“All right, all right. You should know about Andrea,” Anton began. “This was when we didn’t know what would happen when kids come into the game unprepared, and A.J. just lent her another pair of goggles like he always does. The few times she played the game she was fine, but then weird stuff started happening. Inventory would go missing for no reason, rare elements would fall from the sky.”
“That last part was pretty cool, though,” Esme interjected.
“What does that have to do with Lonnie?” I asked.
“Well, when we got out of the game, we found out that her dad got a new job and her family was moving. She was obviously upset about it, and her emotions started turning the game upside down. We tried to keep her mind off it as best we could, and it would get better sometimes. Not enough, though. So A.J. and I started talking about building mods to help prevent someone’s issues from messing with the game. But then…”
“Then, she found out they were moving to a whole new country,” Esme said dramatically, stealing Anton’s thunder. “To Spain!”
“Oh.” I immediately thought about how terrible it would be to know that I’d have to leave all of my friends behind and go to a new place where I didn’t know anyone. How would I even make friends if I didn’t know the language?
Esme nodded, seeing the conclusion forming in my brain.
“The next time she tried to play with us, our realm basically detonated. Biomes started moving around on us, noncombative mobs would start surging at us for no reason, and our home bases were totally wrecked.”
The Crash: An Official Minecraft Novel Page 5