by L. E. Price
“Nope, no status change,” he typed. “You don’t know him, he doesn’t go to our school.”
He hoped Tim would let it go. Instead he dug in like a bloodhound.
“So where do you know him from?”
What did Jake know about Trevor? Arcology kid. Triple-A-credit family. Engineer father, mother in politics. That was the end of the story, but he could make inferences, guesses about the way a family like that would live. He decided to take a chance, knowing that if he got it wrong, his charade was dead in the water.
“You remember that vacation I took last summer?” he typed.
Jake held his breath. All things considered, there was a better-than-average chance the Kensingtons had gone away during Trevor’s summer break. The breath gusted out on a sigh of relief as Tim laughed.
“Remember it? You wouldn’t shut up about it for a month straight.”
Careful now, Jake warned himself. Light on the details, heavy on the confidence. He was on the home stretch, selling the lie.
“That’s where I met Jacius,” he typed. “He’s a local, works for the hotel we were staying at. I tried to sell him on Paradise Clash, but he was a big Golden Temple player at the time. Guess he finally decided to try it out! He uses the same character name in everything he plays.”
“That’s…weird,” Tim said. The amusement faded as he put his junior-detective hat back on. “He didn’t sound Scottish, at all. Not even a little bit. You sure it’s the same guy?”
Jake tried to bang his head against the virtual keyboard. His face passed through it with a ripple of light.
“He’s not,” he typed quickly. “Expatriate, transfer from his corporate home office. He grew up in Barrymore, which is why we started talking in the first place.”
“That makes sense,” Tim said. “Cool. So, does he know about our, uh, extracurriculars?”
There it was. The lead he’d been hoping to find. A piece of Trevor’s life, hidden under the surface. He needed more.
“No,” Jake typed, “but like I said, I trust him. I was thinking about filling him in, but not until I talked to you about it, to make sure you were okay with the idea.”
Tim sounded dubious. “Maybe. I need to get to know him a little better first. And Mag’s got the deciding vote, like always. I don’t need him jumping down my throat again because I sneezed without asking permission first.”
“Tell you what: if you see Jacius, hang out with him some and see what you think. If you decide he’s a good fit for our ‘extracurriculars,’ you can bring him on board yourself. I’m probably going to be stuck in bed and offline for a few more days.”
“Sounds good,” Tim said. “At least the guy has some skills. He was out there fighting displacers in newbie gear. We could use a fighter who can actually fight; the team’s a little support-heavy at the moment. Oh, on that note, pop over to the archive when you get a chance. Mag updated our toolbox. Latest stuff from that certain group of talented fellows out in Novgorod, all of it slightly dodgy but very nice to have.”
This disguise had its limits. Jake couldn’t ask any question Trevor would already know the answer to, so “What archive?” was off the table. He’d have to dig around and find it the hard way. He’d already pushed the masquerade to the breaking point, and he knew to quit while he was ahead.
“Will do,” he typed. “Got to go lay down, I feel like—”
The automatic censor bleeped out the end of the line for him. Tim laughed. “Feel better, man.”
The call disconnected. Jake felt his real heart beating under his featureless body’s chest. He’d gotten away with it. More importantly, he’d found a lead. Tim had been pointedly careful with his language — understandably, given the warning that school officials could listen in on students’ calls — and certain pieces took the air of a prison-yard conversation. “Extracurriculars,” first and foremost, and the way his voice dropped to a conspiratorial hush when he said it. Then there was the mention of the talented fellows from Novgorod. Whatever this “toolbox” was, Jake wanted an up-close look at it.
Now that he had some breathing room, Jake took his time studying the school system, pulling up help files and poking around. He worked out the virtual book bag first: it was a visual representation of a file-storage drive, with a built-in mailing system. Handy, if he wanted to send himself a copy of Trevor’s assignments for offline reading, but he doubted he’d find any answers in the kid’s English homework. The floating window was a little more useful; a third tab offered up Trevor’s schedule, with information on his coursework, teachers and fellow students. Trevor had two classes in common with his buddy Tim, computer science and advanced algebra.
They had a third point of contact after hours: they were both registered members of the academy’s official Sim Builders of Tomorrow club. You already know how to play the games, read the overenthusiastic blurb, now get hands-on experience with the same tools used by the developers at companies like SDS and PlayScape! Learn the basics of virtual modeling, neural haptic response, sound design and more as we work together on this year’s club project: our very own functioning immersive simulation!
The club had fifty-eight students on the membership roster, with a faculty member named Mr. Rickey in charge of the project. The name rang a bell and he scrolled back a little; Rickey taught their computer-science course, too. All of the school’s clubs offered links to an official meeting space. Jake tapped the link and watched the school construct jitter around him, glitching as it broke down into electronic noise.
Now he stood in the middle of an empty classroom, created just for the sim builders’ club. The empty part wasn’t a surprise; it was only a little before ten in the morning, and the club’s members were all offline, in their real-world classes. For that matter, he wasn’t sure how Tim had slipped away to call him; probably an impromptu bathroom break. A pair of long tables stood at the head of the room, just under a chalkboard thick with dates and student names; some kind of production schedule, Jake figured. Models stood in uneven rows along the table’s surface. His gaze wandered over a miniature grass-roofed hut, a palm-sized palm tree, a tiny rowboat made out of woven fronds, bits and pieces of a tropical paradise. One model on the end, a coconut, caught Jake’s eye; it was life-sized but strange, its surface rendered in vivid color as if it had been painted into the world with magic markers.
I love your art, Kelli, and this shows INCREDIBLE effort, read a note beside it, but remember what I taught you about artistic cohesion: if you hand-paint your textures, and Raymond photo-sources the textures for the tree itself, the final result will look jarring. Please hang onto this for your portfolio, but create an appropriate coconut for the team build — Mr. R.
Jake had to smile. There was an overachiever in every class. Some things never changed.
He turned his attention to the blackboard, and to the door set into the left-hand side of the drab beige wall. It was different from the others, not matching the school decor; the door was rustic, textured like faded gray driftwood and flecked with faded traces of sea-blue paint, an old coat worn away by the ravages of wind and time. Above the door, a bar like a stock-market ticker gave a scrolling update in red LED light: SimCastaway Server Status: Alpha 0.37.
Jake took hold of the handle, weightless and putty-like in his hand, and opened the door wide. He stepped across the threshold and into another world.
Sensation flooded in. Warmth, first, a high and shining sun beating down on his weathered cheeks from a cloudless, tranquil sky. He curled his bare toes in hot white sand. He had a new body. Not his. A moment of dysphoria washed over him, the flood of panic from finding himself in foreign skin, his proportions all wrong, and he took deep breaths until it faded. He was a man, stocky and with sunburned skin, dressed in ragged khaki shorts held up by a length of knotted rope. Jake stroked his face and felt the wiry stubble of a five-day beard.
He stood on the shore of a desert island. Nothing but an endless plain of turquoise ocean before him
, and the tangle of a wild jungle at his back. Parrots, big and bright, flashed their rainbow plumage as they winged from the jungle canopy. The air was alive with the trill of insects and the rustle of a hot tropical wind, ruffling the palm fronds.
It wasn’t quite right. The direction of the warm air felt wrong, the air oddly sterile, like he was standing under a heat lamp instead of under a Caribbean sun. Then he realized what was missing: smell. Jake took deep breaths, craning his nose toward the sea. Nothing. They’d implemented sight and touch, but the club hadn’t gotten around to simulating scents yet. As for the sound, it was on a loop; after ten seconds he noticed that the gentle lap of the waves repeated with the steady rhythm of a metronome, each repeat punctuated by the squall of a macaw from the jungle’s edge. The effect was subtle, but just enough to break the illusion.
Still, he had to give the kids credit: when he was their age, his greatest contribution to science was a paper mache volcano. He wasn’t sure how much these games shared in common, in terms of operating controls. Just to try it, he murmured the word, “Sheet.”
His vision flared with scrolling text in ocean blue. A stat report, like the one from Paradise Clash but simpler, stripped down to the basics. His new character had a small handful of skills like Crafting, Swimming and Food Preservation, along with twin meters marked Hunger and Thirst. Both were counting down, a slow and inexorable march to a castaway’s grave. There was another big change from his Paradise Clash character: all of his skills were set to Godlike.
Of course, he thought. Trevor’s deck, Trevor’s character. He’s a designer. A gamemaster. He’ll have access to the entire simulation, even the behind-the-curtain parts.
Which didn’t help if Jake didn’t know how to access them. “gamemaster,” he tried. No result. “GM. Override. Files. Hidden files.”
Nothing. The waves lapped up on the white sand beach. Parrots squawked in the trees, ruffling their rainbow plumage.
If I was a file archive, where would I hide? Jake thought. Trevor, Tim, and whoever played the mysterious mage Magnolto had a private thing going, apart from the rest of the club. It sounded like Magnolto was the ringleader, and picky about who he let in on the secret. He hadn’t seen anything in Trevor’s school files with a link to a private construct, just the club they all shared membership in. Which meant their special toolbox from the ‘talented fellows out in Novgorod’ wouldn’t be anywhere the other club members would easily find it. Somewhere out in the jungle, in the trackless green hell?
No. Jake ran down the facts, assembling a picture. He knew that Tim and Magnolto were hunting the sea dragon, chasing their odd obsession with a monster that didn’t exist. It sounded like Trevor might have been in on the hunt, too. He remembered Woody’s story about how the dragon hunters had gotten their start, daring one another to plunge deeper and deeper into a trackless ocean.
Jake turned to the shore. Then he started to walk.
14.
Warm water lapped at Jake’s ankles, then his thighs, swallowing him bit by bit as he marched into the surf. It rose to his neck, a tangle of slimy seaweed under the soles of his bare feet. Then he took a deep breath and let it devour him whole.
They hadn’t simulated the sting of saltwater; he kept his eyes open down in the tranquil blue, the waves above his head illuminated in golden glitter from the dance of sunlight on the sea. The ocean bed was an endless plain of white sand and seaweed, stretching out into the murky distance. The sounds of the world above became muffled, then they went silent as a grave.
This was an unfinished land. Either the club hadn’t turned their attention to the sea, or they never intended to; after all, it was a game about surviving as a castaway, not swimming to freedom. No one was supposed to come down here. After ten feet, the scant seaweed and rough textured sand gave way to a smooth and empty downward slope. No coral, no fish, no life. Jake was alone in the gathering dark.
In the upper-right corner of his vision, a fresh bar had blossomed. A breath meter etched in luminous blue, showing how long he could survive under the sea. Rank had its privileges: the bar held firm at one-hundred percent, not budging an inch. Trevor had made sure he could roam under the waves as long as he wanted to.
After five minutes of walking, the sand wasn’t even textured anymore. It was a sloping flat plain of funeral gray. The sunlight struggled to plunge this deep. Its last glowing fingers strained to light Jake’s path and died out, glimmering, in the murky shadows.
He could see how the first divers in Paradise Clash might imagine leviathans, in the deep. The silence was oppressive, a sense of cold loneliness that weighed his sluggish footsteps as he fought against the gathering pressure. He was a marooned astronaut, a traveler on a lonely world never meant for the eyes of man. Spend enough time down here, he thought, I’ll start seeing things too.
Like the pale rectangle rising up from the gloom, just ahead.
Excitement spurred his heels and he half-jogged, half-swam along the ocean floor, pulling himself forward with powerful breaststrokes. He had found the ocean’s secret.
A door stood upon the bottom of the seabed, nestled in the untextured sand. It was plain, eggshell white, just like a door in an average house. Jake’s feet landed before it, kicking up a puff of sand. He took hold of the faded brass knob and opened it wide.
There was a room on the other side of the door. With one step Jake crossed from wet to bone-dry. He didn’t even leave a puddle on the cool flagstone floor: a feathery sensation whisked over him on the threshold, automated code toweling him down and holding the ocean back. A tinny voice in Jake’s inner ear announced, “Deck ID confirmed. Welcome back, Trevor.”
Trevor and his friends had a secret clubhouse of their own. A simulation built inside another simulation inside a third simulation, nested like a Russian doll. Tropical bliss was replaced by hard stone and guttering torchlight; they’d built their lair with medieval ambiance in mind. A rough-hewn strategy table dominated the heart of the windowless chamber. Bookshelves, stuffed to bursting, lined one wall. The other sported their only nod to modernity: it held a bank of mounted video screens, broadcasting feeds from a dozen spy cameras. Not in the real world, though. They showed views of the surface, different angles of the castaway island and the jungle’s depths. Another captured the virtual clubroom in the school construct, filming the class from a bird’s-eye view.
Smart, Jake thought. The feeds were for keeping an eye on their fellow club-members. If the other students — or the teacher for that matter — came poking around, Trevor and his buddies would know to bail and lock the place down before they got too close.
A tapestry banner draped above the bookshelves marked their territory, bright golden thread on a field of woven black. Barrymore Arcology Dragon Hunters’ Club.
So, Trevor was one of the gang, hunting down a myth. Didn’t mean his after-school hobby had anything to do with his mental abduction; after all, Tim and his wizard pal were still running around free, taking measurements and chasing the dragon, but something about the hunt inspired a certain level of paranoia. The sea dragon was a conspiracy theorists’ wet dream, and Jake had already seen the kind of passion — positive and negative — just mentioning it could inspire.
Which made him wonder, not for the first time, about the motives of the game designers over at SDS. Their apparent hands-off policy on the “Lollers” showed that they weren’t above the occasional social experiment, treating their paying customers like laboratory rats and studying their reactions. Was their denial of the sea dragon just another experiment? Had they planted something to find, down in the ocean black, then erased it from the simulation just to see how players would react?
If they had, what was their endgame?
Jake drifted to the strategy table. He recognized some of the scattered parchment maps from Woody’s strategy guides: they were sections of Paradise Clash’s map, annotated with cramped handwriting and geometric lines carefully drawn with a protractor and straightedge. Mathema
tical formulas were a sorcery of their own, an arcane code Jake couldn’t begin to crack. All he could gather was that the club took their hunt seriously, and they pursued it with academic rigor.
He turned to the bookshelves. They were fake, set dressing, nothing but blank pages ruffling between their moldering leather covers. An old sea chest, banded with tarnished brass, offered the potential for real treasure. Jake crouched down, tugged at the rusted padlock — and it popped open under his fingers. No key required.
Or the key is the person opening it, he thought. The sim recognized me — well, recognized the person whose deck I’m using — when I first walked in. Storage for members only. He lifted the lid and gazed down at the club’s secret stash. It was a mound of talismans, gleaming platinum and gold, each one about the size of his palm and studded with a kaleidoscope of jewels.
Not just decor, this time. They stood out, highlighted in wire-frame blue, and a text window blossomed over Jake’s vision as his fingers brushed the hammered-gold surface of the one on top. Its name — MerchTracker 2.8 — rode atop a flood of data listing its creation date, file size, and then a fat chunk of Cyrillic letters.
One by one, Jake scooped up the files and dropped them into Trevor’s virtual bookbag alongside his schoolwork. Fiddling with the school system’s menus brought up a workable file-sharing system. He used his own implant to put in a call to Woody. A moment later, his new partner’s voice crackled in Jake’s inner ear.
“Right place, wrong time,” Woody said. “I’m somewhere on the grid, doing something important. Wait for the beep, leave a message, and I’ll call you back.”
The file-share pipeline was a crystalline pneumatic tube. Jake fed the amulets in one at a time, watching a current of digital air slurp them down and fire them off like bullets.
“Woody, it’s Jake. Looks like Trevor, Timothy Miller — that’s Rolen the Blue’s player — and whoever plays Magnolto are all in the same after-school program at Barrymore Arcology. They’re using it as a cover for their dragon-hunting club. Not sure if it’s just the three of them or if more students are in on it. Anyway, they’ve got some seriously dodgy-looking files in their private stash. I’m sending them over to you; can you take a look, let me know what you think?”