by Tracy Deebs
Theo yells at me to move, but I can’t. I’m completely trapped. Then the strangest thing happens—fire shoots from Theo’s fingertips straight at the huge, furious monster. It hits her square in the center of her body, and she screams in rage and pain. He follows up the blast with another, more powerful blast to the arm that is holding me down. She screeches, lets go, and I roll away from her—and the snakes—as fast as possible. But Theo tosses a third fireball at the snakes, which writhe on the ground as they are completely engulfed in flames.
“Wicked!” Eli crows, and for a second I’m not sure if it’s game Eli or real Eli saying it. Here, in this strange new world, reality and gaming mix until they feel the same. Until they both feel real. “How’d you do that, dude?”
“I don’t know.” Theo is looking at his hands, puzzled. “It just happened.”
“I want to try.” Eli holds out his hands in the same gesture that Theo had used, but nothing happens. He tries again, hits nearly every key on the keyboard, but still nothing changes. He starts muttering to himself, determination to figure out what his stepbrother did written into every line of his body.
While he experiments, I check out the damage to my avatar. I’m limping pretty badly, and blood is dripping from the claw marks Campe left in my upper arm and calf, but other than that everything seems to be okay.
Theo comes over and kneels at my feet as he, too, examines my wounds. “If we find a bathroom or someplace with running water, we’ll get that cleaned up. You don’t want an infection.”
“Can avatars even get infections?” I ask.
“They can in MMOs. That’s why so many of the resources are medicine or healing herbs—even healing knowledge. Healers are highly prized.”
I look down at my leg with new eyes, wishing for the virtual-reality version of Neosporin. It would suck to survive an attack by a crazed dragon lady only to succumb to an infection in a few virtual days.
The thought has me looking at the sky, trying to judge how much time has passed. The sun has sunk behind the trees, and streams of red and orange and purple streak across the sky.
“Come on,” I say finally. “We need to keep going.”
“Yeah, sure. Of course.” But Eli looks totally disappointed as he drops his hands, giving up on bringing forth fireballs, and falls into step beside me. The three of us begin walking toward the huge clump of trees to our right.
We’ve only gone a few steps when Eli exclaims, “Hey, what did we win?”
“I don’t know.” And I don’t particularly care. If we haven’t won a chance to get out of this stupid game once and for all, then I’m just not interested. But when I remember that my real life demands Internet access, a cell phone, and television, I keep my mouth shut.
Barely.
“It’s over there,” Theo says, and I look to where he’s pointing. There’s a box sitting on a tree stump, one I know wasn’t there when I was frantically scanning for a weapon a few minutes before.
We run to it, and Theo reaches in, coming out with a huge handful of seed packets. Tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries, blackberries, various types of lettuce—nearly every kind of seed you can imagine.
“We’re supposed to plant a garden?” I ask, confused.
“What the hell?” demands Eli, looking annoyed. “How are these supposed to get us to the end of the game?”
I don’t answer. I mean, in the real world, I love to plant things—flowers, berries, trees—and watch as they grow. I spend hours in the spring and summer working on the flower beds around my house, as well as the small vegetable garden my mom let me create in the backyard. I have a hella green thumb, and nearly everything I plant flourishes beautifully.
But here? In a video game? What’s the point?
“I don’t know,” Theo says in answer to Eli’s question. “But take them, anyway.” He throws me a bunch of packets before reaching back into the box for more. “Put these in your pockets.”
I follow orders, watch as the two of them do the same. Then say, “Come on, maybe we can find some NPCs and trade them for something.”
“Have you seen any?” Eli demands, though he doesn’t pause in stuffing his pockets with seeds. “Besides that ugly hag, I mean?”
“No. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
We start to walk again, and now that we’ve been playing for a while and Satan’s girlfriend is no longer after us, it seems to take forever to get anywhere. We find a place to clean up; then, as we continue on, a few more players join us—real people, not NPCs—following behind as if they expect the three of us to have the answers to all the questions that must be winding through their heads right now. Which I guess proves Theo’s theory right. We’re not the only ones this is happening to.
Someone IMs me, his message popping up in the bottom right-hand corner of my screen. The user ID tells me he’s one of the first people to start following us—the guy who’s dressed in jeans and a navy-blue hoodie and looks like he’s in his early twenties. Jason47.
What’s happening?
I point out the question to Eli and Theo.
“Ask him if he’s having the same issues we are,” Eli suggests.
So I do, and he comes back with:
This is the only thing working in my whole house.
Are you from West Lake?
No. Round Rock.
“Shit. That’s North Austin,” Theo says.
Way north. Like forty minutes from here. How fast is this thing spreading? Theo’d commented earlier that it could have gone around the world several times already, but I don’t think I actually believed him before now.
More like I didn’t want to believe him.
I type in:
How long have you been in the game?
About twenty minutes. My computer has been dead for the longest time, just this weird thing about beating the game and saving the world. Then suddenly it beeped and dropped me in.
I glance at the clock. It’s been about twenty-five minutes since I opened the box. He must have been dropped in after, just like Theo and Eli.
Then he asks:
So, what do we do now? This is weird.
What else? Play the game.
He doesn’t answer, so I wait a second before I type:
I have to go now.
Then I close the messaging, cutting him off. I know it’s rude, but I’m losing it and the last thing I need is to deal with someone else who is obviously freaking out. So far, Eli and Theo have managed to keep me calm, but dealing with someone else as weirded out as I am might send me completely over the edge.
“You ready to keep going?” Eli asks, placing a warm, comforting hand on my back.
I stiffen a little at the contact. Sure, things are messed up, but he’s still a guy. And his hand is resting on the small of my back.
I shrug off my concern, try to keep my eye on the prize as I wonder where this is going to end—or if it is.
“Hey, think positive,” Eli says.
“How’d you know—”
“Are you kidding me?” He nods toward Theo. “You and my brother seem hardwired for the whole doom-and-gloom thing.”
“It doesn’t get much more doom and gloom than this.” I gesture to the screen, where we’re all just standing around, looking lost.
“Yeah, well, we’ll pretend that’s not the case.” Then he makes some goofball face at me, and I can’t help laughing. I’m not sure how Theo does it, because, for me at least, it’s pretty hard to stay depressed when Eli’s around.
Back in the game, we walk for what seems like hours but is probably only about five minutes—everything with this stupid game feels like it takes forever—until we get to the huge fields where one of Austin’s biggest music festivals, Austin City Limits, is held every year. I was just in these fields last month, rocking out to Muse, Sonic Youth, the Flaming Lips, and about two hundred other bands, but the fields of Pandora’s Box are as different from the fiel
ds in those three fun-and-music-filled days as modern-day America is from ancient Greece.
Lining one edge of the gigantic fields are tents, hundreds of them, six or seven deep. These aren’t your typical REI state-of-the-art mobile camping units, either. These are worn-out, worn-down ragtag pieces of canvas that look like the weakest Austin storm could blow them straight to oblivion.
“What is this?” I whisper, as thousands of people pour from the tents into the clearing. They are as dilapidated looking as the tents they’ve been cowering under—maybe more so—and I feel my breath hitch in my chest. Who are these people and why are they here, in this game?
We walk closer, and as we do, I realize just what bad shape they’re in. The little ones are running around in ripped T-shirts, their ribs poking through their skin in stark relief, while many of the adults seem so weak that they can barely stand.
“Are these people real?” I ask, so horrified that it doesn’t register that if they don’t have food, they probably don’t have computers to suck them into this virtual reality.
“I don’t think so,” Eli answers. “They look like NPCs to me.”
“They are NPCs,” Theo agrees. “And I think this is our first task.” He reaches into his pockets and pulls out the packets of seeds. “My guess is that we’re supposed to feed them.”
“Are you kidding me?” Eli scoffs. “That’s too easy, isn’t it?”
“We’re at level one. It’s supposed to be easy.”
“Yeah, because Campe was just a barrel of laughs.”
“Either way, I think we need to feed these people to level up,” Theo says, holding out some seed packets to one of the girls standing behind us.
She grabs three packets of strawberry seeds.
Theo looks at the players behind us, gestures for them to come closer, which they do, eagerly. I can understand why. Even Theo’s avatar looks like someone who’s used to being in charge. Though he’s young, only a senior in high school, he has that indefinable way about him, and that translates to the game. There’s none of the brooding now, and as I watch him get things organized it’s easy to forget what happened this morning.
Especially since right here, right now, I’m more than willing to do whatever he tells me, just so long as I don’t have to make the decision myself. Fighting Campe as I feared for my digital life took a lot more out of me than I first suspected.
“To beat the game, obviously, we need to advance through the levels. To beat this level, I think the task is to put these seeds in the ground so that all these NPCs can get some food.” He walks over to a clear, unmuddy patch of grass and squats down. But when he tries to empty the seed packet into the ground, nothing happens.
“What’s going on?” I ask. “Why isn’t it working?”
“I don’t know. You try,” he tells me.
I follow his lead, try to dump out the seeds. Again, nothing happens.
Eli tries, with the same result, as do all of the other players.
“Why won’t it work?” I ask again, frustrated. How are we supposed to beat the game if we can’t complete the task?
Theo shrugs, presses a few buttons and tries again—to no avail.
“We’re missing something,” Eli finally says.
“We defeated the monster, got our reward. This is obviously our task, right?” I shove my computer away, stand up, and walk to the sliding glass door that leads to my backyard. Everything out there looks so normal—the grass is green, the trees are swaying lightly in the breeze while a squirrel scampers past a light, a nut clasped in its little paws. So how can everything in here be so screwed up?
“I don’t know. But we need to figure it out. Go back over the places we’ve been and try to see what we missed.” Eli retraces our last steps.
I start to tell him I’m out for a while, that I just can’t do any more right now. But before I say anything, Emily comes flying through my front door.
“Major change of plans, chica.”
Now that the action is over, the game lets my avatar drop out. I turn to my best friend, who—despite the beginning of technological Armageddon—looks as fresh as she did when I drove her home from school this afternoon.
“Obviously.”
“So you know?” she asked. “I tried to call you, but my phone’s out and so are all the ones in my neighborhood.”
I can’t help it—I start to laugh. It’s not funny, but I laugh until tears roll from my eyes. Hysterical much?
Theo, Eli, and Emily are all staring at me like I’ve lost my mind, although Emily keeps stealing glimpses at the guys, like she can’t believe they’re sitting in my family room. Of course, if the last two hours hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be able to believe it, either.
“I take it that means you already know?” she asks, when my hysteria finally calms down.
“You could say that.” I point to Eli and Theo, introduce them to Emily. “They’ve been helping me try to figure out what’s going on.”
“Good luck. Someone in the government contacted my dad an hour ago. He’s working on it but can’t seem to get anywhere yet. Whatever it is, it’s a huge mess, some kind of blended threat. He’s using words I haven’t heard since he helped map out the Stuxnet worm.”
I exchange uneasy glances with Eli and Theo. “So this thing is really bad, then?”
“That’s the impression I get.” She leans back against my couch and blows a bubble with her trademark strawberry gum, looking completely relaxed. Like we’re talking about what shade of lipstick she should wear instead of a worm that has shut down nearly every form of communication we’ve got. “Close to an hour ago the game opened up for everyone, and my dad tried to slip through the matrix to get a handle on it, but he said he couldn’t get through. There’s something blocking him and all of the other government hackers.
“He says this is unlike any worm or virus he’s ever seen, that it’s some weird amalgamation of both that’s taking over everything it comes into contact with.”
“How many people are infected at this point?” Theo asks. “Are there any estimates?”
“I have no idea. I just know it’s a lot.” She looks at him curiously. “Are you coming to dinner with us?”
“Dinner?” Eli asks, just as his stomach rumbles.
“To celebrate Pandora’s birthday. We’re going for pizza. You should come.”
“I thought you said there was a change of plans?” I ask, suddenly not so crazy about the way Emily is looking at Eli and Theo. I feel stupid for letting it bug me, especially since I barely know either one of them, but I can’t help it. I’ve spent the last couple of hours with them, and even with all the Pandora’s Box stuff, it’s been kind of nice to have them on my side. Paying attention to me. Which makes me selfish as well as moronic and the cause of all things Armageddon. Fantastic.
“My dad says I can’t stay over if there’s no phone. Plus, he doesn’t want you here on your own, either. He didn’t say anything else—my mom started losing it—but I think this is going to end up being a pretty big deal. So pack a bag for a couple of days, and after we have dinner, we can head to my place.”
I don’t bother arguing, largely because I’m so relieved that I don’t have to stay here alone with no phone and spotty electricity.
Emily waits for a beat, but once she realizes I’m on board with the new plan, she turns to Theo. “So, Othello, do you two want to come or not?”
I blush wildly at her reference to what happened in my English class, but Theo takes it in stride.
Eli laughs. “I do.” Then he winks at her, and I’m struck, not for the first time, by what a charmer he is. And even more, despite his fan club of legions, how he’s really just a nice, sweet guy at the heart of it all.
I can’t help liking that about him.
Which is so not what I should be thinking about right now. To keep myself distracted, I shove off the couch and head for the kitchen. “Do you guys want something to drink? The fridge is pretty much empty of
food but I’ve got soda, water, and iced tea.”
Right on schedule, Eli’s stomach growls again, and he smiles in good-natured embarrassment. “I don’t think a soda’s going to hold me for long,” he admits.
“I guess we can leave the game for a little while.” Theo stands up reluctantly, as if he expects the world to end while we’re at dinner, and heads for the door. “Just let me run next door and get my wallet and the car.”
“I’ll go with you.”
Emily and I watch as the guys head out. She smiles sweetly when they give us small waves, but the second the door closes behind them, she’s on me. “Oh my God! They are even hotter up close.” She fake swoons. “And they both seem pretty cool.”
“They are.”
“So have you decided which one you want? Eli, right? Because of the whole …”—she mimes strangling herself—“Othello thing with Theo? Oh, please say Eli. He’s hot, but Theo is gorgeous. And I totally felt a connection between us …”
“They’re not candy, you know. We can’t just divvy them up.”
“Sure we can—one for you and one for me! We don’t want to crush on the same guy, after all. And if they were candy, I’d bet Theo would be the kind with the hard chocolate shell and melted caramel center. Yummy.”
“I think you mean nutty center, don’t you?”
She sighs heavily. “Could you be a little more of a wet blanket?”
“Sorry, but the world is falling apart, in case you haven’t noticed. Now’s not exactly the time to be worrying about hot guys.”
“My dad will fix it—he’s the best at this stuff. Besides, there’s always time to worry about hot guys. Speaking of which …” She sends me her wide-eyed, pleading look.
“Don’t worry. I’m so not crushing on Theo.”
“I knew it. He’s a little too much for you. Plus, Eli’s got that dimple, and I know how you are—”