By: Gunnar de Winter
Zane pushes the visor down on his hair, which is both too short and too long; an unruly mess of unwanted slants and unfinished waves. He blinks and becomes Riptide, the shark-faced avatar with bulging muscles he uses to cruise the NeoCade.
He falls toward the bubbling froth of the multiverse of gaming worlds that runs on the engines of InfiniGames Corp. Each bubble in the NeoCade holds the promise of a unique reality full of quests and enemies to vanquish. Zane knows most of them. He's here on a quest of his own.
He selects Netropolis and pierces the world's membrane. His avatar pixels into existence in a gloomy back alley. It fits here, his shark self. Riptide is a sharp, fast shadow that swims through narrow streets lined by skyscrapers lighting the night with bright neon outlines.
In the top right of his vision shines a list of tasks and the credits he can earn by completing them. He skims it – drug run, blackmail a rich guy, museum robbery, kick the ass of one of the superhero avatars – and then blinks it away. Boring kid play. Riptide sniffs the air, hungry for virtual blood. No gaming world is perfect, after all, and Zane is interested in the cracks.
There. In the nightclub district where people live out their childish fantasy of endless partying while being stuck in their gaming chairs.
He sticks to the back alleys, trying to avoid the chum of regular gamers.
As he weaves his way toward the hum and neon lights of the nightclub bonanza, an angelic warrior in all gold materializes beside him. "Hey, Riptide. Thought I saw your sig."
Riptide snaps his razor teeth. "Solaris." They met during a quest in one of the fantasy worlds and kept bumping into each other ever since. The two of them once looted a troll dungeon behind the backs of a group of obnoxiously righteous paladins. It had been a good score.
"Careful," Solaris chitters, "you might use too many words for your processor." Both the wings and sword of the golden angel flow like liquid fire. Her hair too is a waterfall of gilded waves. A pair of bandoliers cross her chest and her skirt is made of chainmail.
"Busy," Riptide replies.
"Oh, so we're doing the one-word thing." She draws her sword and holds it in front of her with two hands, throwing a spear of light through the alley, much to the annoyance of Zane. "Quest?"
"Sort of."
"Those are two words."
The shark man huffs like a bull.
"Hunting cracks, then? Ah, I'm right, am I not? The mystery symbols." She twirls her sword with a flourish. The weapon leaves a wake of fading sunlight.
Solaris is right, which annoys Zane even more.
The scent is getting stronger, as is the bass that thumps into Riptide's feet. Part of Zane's mind spots several easy targets lined up for virtual nightclubs. It would be childishly straightforward to make some of their in-game credits trickle into his encrypted account. But not now. As he makes his way past the line of hopeful party people, Riptide's dorsal fin slices through the humid air heavy with alcohol fumes and other clouds of mind-altering nature. Why anyone would come to a game for that was as much a mystery to Zane as why they'd come here to party in the first place.
Solaris snorts, thinking the same thing, and then shrugs. "Can't argue about tastes, I suppose."
Riptide turns into a narrow and dark side street. Another turn and the shark and the angel end up behind the nightclub.
"Have you ever been to one of these?" Solaris asks, pointing her perfect chin to the building in which people spent their hard-earned game credits on a simulacrum of earthly pleasures.
"Not worth the credits." Riptide lifts his pointed nose.
"No, I mean in real life."
"Of course, plenty of times." A lie. Zane is the kind of kid who – apparently – doesn't get invited to parties. And nightclubs are off limits for several more years.
"Yeah. Me too."
Riptide cocks his head. A lie too? Then, the shark man's enhanced musculature ripples as he shoves a garbage container out of the way. And there it is. A symbol, glossy and blue-green, as if algae decided to grow on the damp, crumbling wall in the shape of an ancient QR code. Riptide blinks slowly to drop a snapshot in one of Zane's private cloud stashes outside of the NeoCade.
"Ooh, neat one," Solaris says.
The symbol fades. They all do after Zane finds them.
Riptide grumbles while Zane projects all of the collected symbols in his field of vision, overlaid on the game world. They don't make sense, just a bunch of squiggles, angles, and dots, squirming like they're alive. Normally, he's good at spotting patterns. He was – literally – built for it.
Two words in blaring red letters override his game HUD.
Mom alert.
#
A rushed breakfast of algae crackers and hummus, then a quick ride in the self-driving cab, and Zane plunks on his class seat. For the life of him, he can't figure out why students have to be here in person. Socialization, the principal promised his parents. How's that working out, huh?
"Okay, everyone. There is an assignment waiting on your pads, based on the orbital mechanics lessons from yesterday."
Shapes and trajectories whirl on the tinted glass of Zane's desk. A dumbed-down rendition of the solar system, a shuttle with specs, and a checklist of locations for the shuttle to visit within its fuel limits. Kid's play. Zane runs a few sims and figures it out. A lopsided eight trajectory with multiple gravity slingshots.
He doesn't enter his solution yet, though. Miss Stevenson, a bright-eyed new teacher, always tries to make him do advanced assignments. He wouldn't mind, but might as well brand himself with 'loser' in capital letters on his forehead if he seems too eager.
By all the gaming gods, this is boring. The edu-visor on his desk winks at him. He hacked it before, but it would be too obvious at the moment. So, he's stuck pretending to work for now.
When he sees others lean back after finishing the task, he sends in his solution too. Fortunately, the ranking on the blackboard is anonymous. One correct solution so far.
More tasks follow, each one more complex than the next. The distance between one and two on the blackboard increases with each task.
And then, it's lunchtime. Everybody slithers into their self-appointed clique and tries to win social points. It's like a zoo and Zane is the only spectator.
He finds his spot in the corner and chomps down on printed bao buns that his mother adorned with (real?) vegetables and a note to have a good day. For a reason Zane can't name, he feels both annoyed and guilty.
A few tables over, a group of girls giggles. Zane crumples the note. They're preening to get the attention of tall, handsome Tory, who always finds himself surrounded by wide-eyed classmates yearning for his approval. Tory's parents probably genmodded him for aesthetics and athleticism. Zane's parents blew their entire prenatal clinic budget on genmods for pattern recognition and reaction speed. All it did was make him good at games, and then they got annoyed when he gamed too much. Idiots. They didn't understand him. To be fair, he didn't understand himself either.
He scowls at his bun, as if it held the answer to why he felt so… off. Different. But also not wanting to be part of the popularity contest.
From the corner of his eyes, Zane notices a group of people walk past, stop for a moment, and then walk on while leaving one of its members behind. Someone sits down across from him. He glances up.
Sadie. She always reminds Zane of a mouse. Slightly smaller and slightly paler than most other girls. Large, nervous eyes. Stop staring at her, you idiot, his inner Riptide voice says.
She grants him a flicker of a smile. "You're Riptide, aren't you?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"How's the symbol hunt coming along?"
"Wrong guy."
"At least that's two words."
Something must have happened with his face, because Sadie's smile widens. She has a nice smile. "I knew it," she says. She extends her hand. "Solaris, nice to meet you."
Zane frowns at the proffered hand. How did she know? Also, she is Solaris?
"Wow, just as gruff in real life, I see." Sadie drops her hand. "Anyway, I thought you'd like to know that we've got a gaming club after school. Maybe we can help with your quest? But you're probably too cool for that, right? Forget about it."
She talks too fast and whirlwinds away before Zane's thoughts congeal into something that makes sense. Was she always like that, or was she as nervous as he was? Her speech sped up, his slowed down; spaceships at different speeds passing in an endless night.
Zane parses what Sadie said. A gaming club?
Nonsense. He is Riptide.
Riptide doesn’t need a crew.
#
Mom and Dad are in the kitchen when Zane gets back from school. Dad is supposed to be at work at this time, but two other observations set Zane on high alert. One, they're arguing, and two, they're not alone.
"… told you with all that gaming." That's Dad.
"Derreck," Mom hisses before turning to Zane in the doorway. "Hi honey, how was school?"
Zane doesn't reply. He eyes the third person in the room. A suit, tailored, groomed, and tapping a shiny dress shoe.
"Honey," Mom says, "this is mister Jones, from InfiniGames."
Zane snorts. Mister Jones? Sure.
"Zane, is it?" Mister Jones leans forward, wafting sharp aftershave and already forgetting about Zane's parents. "We've been following you in the NeoCade."
Uh oh. "So?" He didn't do anything wrong.
"The, hum, data you've been collecting is proprietary information, son." Mister Jones straightens up and pulls the hem of his vest.
Zane's father, shirt still ruffled from a hasty drive home, interjects. "Didn't I tell you to stop that hacking? Why can't you just play a game, Zane?"
"Derreck," Zane's Mom puts a hand on Dad's arm, then turns to her son. "Zane, honey, whatever you did, it's okay. You didn't know, right? So, they'll just take your chair and wipe the data from it. Right, mister Jones?"
"I didn't do anything," Zane blurts. Take his chair? Screw that. "It's not my fault the NeoCade has backdoors."
At this Mister Jones' right eyebrow climbs. "Son, you don't have any idea what you're dealing with. True, it's impressive that you hunted the data down, but now it's time to let the professionals handle it. Our team is on it and they will soon patch the issue, which will be much easier without your meddling."
"Or what?" The moment he says it, Zane knows it was a mistake. Impulse control is not his strength.
Mister Jones leans forward again, this time with a smug grin on his stubbled face. "It's not difficult for us to ban a user from anything that runs on our engines, son, even one as talented as you." He leans back and finally addresses Zane's parents. "Your son is talented. I'm going to give you my virtu-card. When this, hum, issue is dealt with, we could perhaps look at an internship for Zane."
The bright smile spreading over his mom's face tells Zane that she's already on board. "Mom, they can't take my chair. All my credits are on there. All the quests I've completed."
"Honey…"
Crap. Last resort, then. "Dad? Dad, I'm sorry. I won't do it again, but don't let them take the chair."
Dad's frown is another tale, one of not giving in to his son's plea.
Mister Jones nods. He got what he came for. Not that it ever was a negotiation. Two men in coveralls are already coming down the stairs, handling a top-notch gaming chair.
Zane tries to run over to stop them, but Dad stops him. "No. Actions have consequences, Zane. It's time you learned that." Mister Jones joins the men and mumbles something to them.
"Daaad. Please." Zane loathes the way his voice breaks. Inside, he is seething. Come on. Focus. You still have the cloud stash outside of InfiniGames' servers. You can still get all the codes. But how do I enter the NeoCade without my chair? Gaming club. Groan. He shrugs out of his father's grasp and picks up his bag.
Mom jumps from her chair. "Zane, honey, where are you going?"
"After school stuff. It's not like I can do anything here, right? Might as well do some extracurriculars."
The second time he tries to wriggle free from Dad's hand fails. His father turns Zane so they face each other. "Zane," his father whispers, "do you really think I buy that?" A smile plays at the corner of Dad's lips. "I know my son. I also know you're smart enough to understand the consequences of getting caught twice at whatever it is you've been doing."
Zane squirms and tries to speak, but his father's piercing gaze shuts him up. "I also know my son is not a bad kid. Bad young man, I mean." He leans closer, until his face is next to Zane's. "So don't let them catch you twice." Dad raises his voice. "Good. It's about time you invest in something else than those silly games." He winks at Zane, then turns to Mister Jones in the hallway. "No disrespect intended, of course."
Mister Jones raises his hands in fake magnanimity before following his colleagues out as they maneuver Zane's chair into a van with the snazzy, looping InfiniGames logo.
Zane zips out the backdoor.
Sometimes, Dad is cool.
#
Hacking a self-driving cab is no big deal, but Zane goes legit. He does, however, deduct the credits from his parents' account. Dad might be cool occasionally, his parents still let InfiniGames take his chair, so it's only fair.
A flash of his student wrist chip later, and he's back in the school compound, which is, frankly, annoying. He already spends too much time between these walls. But, for now, the ends justify the location. From the central courtyard, Zane spots plenty of activity. He might have been joking about extracurriculars, but many of his schoolmates clearly aren't. All of them are trying to boost their resident score like good little citizens. He shakes his head. Noobs at the game of life. How can they not see that rules are chains?
Hands in his pockets, he heads for the game room, or, officially, the teaching room for full immersion educational programming for level two students. Zane snorts. There better be a free chair.
The opaque glass door beeps upon his approach and slides open. He cleared level two ages ago. Four heads swivel toward him – two dappled with acne, one with whiskers that try and fail to be a mustache, and one with wide eyes that quickly turn smug. "Look who decided to join us."
Oh, Riptide, if you could see me now… "Problems with my chair," Zane shrugs while trying to convince himself that the fire in his cheeks has not turned them red.
Solaris – Sadie – gets out of her swivel chair and crosses her arms. "Who said that you can just use one of ours?"
Zane groans and contemplates turning around. "Yours? Yeah, sure."
Sadie steps closer. "Yes, between six and eight pm, ours. And I don't know if I feel like letting you use one."
"Who made you boss?" Zane takes a deep breath. Impulse control, he reminds himself. He raises his hands. "Sorry. I have a quest and I could use some help. Solaris' help." Surely, that would sway her. Riptide doesn't need a crew, but maybe today, he can use cannon fodder.
"What kind of help?" Suspicion slows down Sadie's swift speech, but Zane knows an in when he gets one.
He becomes suddenly aware of the others' eyes on him and the fire in his cheeks returns. "Well, I'm collecting these, uh, symbols that are strewn across the NeoCade, and I think that I have almost all of them." He played around with them during class and it looked like they were supposed to be arranged in a seven-by-seven grid. It was hard to say why, but when he slotted the first row in place, tendrils from the symbols reached for each other to lock themselves in place. His pattern-matching instinct latched onto it. "I think I need one more, but – " Zane stopped himself. How much did he want them to know?
Sadie taps her foot. "But what?"
Zane decides to lean into it and give them a (redacted) truth. He won't tell them it might be dangerous. All he needs is one of the chairs to use. He can always ditch them later. "InfiniGames showed up at my house." That, he notices, perks up the ears of the others even more. "They basically told me off. So you know that, whatever this is about, it's something good."
"Why not wait until your chair is back online? I thought you were too cool for gaming club?"
She isn't making it easy for him. Zane grins. Good. He has one ace left to play. "I never said that. Anyway, InfiniGames said they had a team patching the issues. I think they're lying. It's not an issue, but it's something they're trying to hide. We don't have a lot of time. This is our chance to whoop the virtual asses of a professional programming team."
Sadie's eyes twinkle and Zane knows he's got her. She tries to play it cool and looks at each of the others, who, one by one, nod. Zane knew they wouldn't be able to resist. He digs in his memory for the names of the three other gaming club members. The girl who's always twirling her pigtails around her fingers is Rita. The big dude… Mustafa? The name of the final member, more limbs than body, starts with an R. That's all Zane's got.
Sadie must see him wracking his brain, because she smirks before she says, "Rita, Mustafa, Rowan, meet Zane, aka Riptide."
That annoys him – bite your tongue, he tells himself – but it also earns him approving nods.
"Take the chair next to Rowan," Sadie says, "and let's see what this is all about."
#
Riptide looks at the froth of the NeoCade. He overlays them with the locations of the symbols acquired so far. Then, it's only a matter of trusting his pattern-matching instincts. He is vaguely aware of the others floating beside him.
The bubbles that light up are all surrounded by game worlds without symbol; dots of light in the dark. It's a simple pattern, really. There. But it is a pattern and the distribution of the symbols across the NeoCade sparks two thoughts in Zane's mind: one, someone has to be behind the pattern, and two, if the symbols are connected, but their locations aren't, there’s a layer to the NeoCade he hasn't found yet.
"There," he says, pointing at Aquatopia, which, if his guess is correct, is where the last symbol is hiding.
Sadie – Solaris – groans. "The water messes up my avatar's fire accessories."
"You can wait here if you want," Riptide grins.
"As if."
Riptide turns to the others. "The symbols hide in high-traffic areas, so we'll start in Barnacle City." It's almost as if the symbols – or the people behind them – want to be found, just not by anyone.
The shark-man barrels toward Aquatopia's bubble, pierces the membrane, and materializes beneath the surface of a planet-spanning ocean. Barnacle City sits in a canyon, yet bioluminescent algae that float above the avatars' heads ensure it's clear as day. Giant barnacles that occasionally burp a jet of glittering water stick to the canyon walls. Almost everything is green and blue, except for the marble cowrie and cockle shell buildings that line the broad avenues.
The haptic feedback and resolution aren't quite up to par with Zane's personal chair, but it'll do.
Solaris burps into existence next to him, in a bright yellow diving suit with a transparent bubble helmet. Rita, as her avatar Bombshell, towers over Riptide as a leather-skinned, knuckle-walking troll. Berserker? Zane thinks, pleasantly surprised. Mustafa, as Catmandu, is a large, gilled cat with chromatophores that adapt its skin to the environment. Rogue? Finally, Rowan, as Void, is a billowing cloud in a long, cowled robe that swirls with its own waves despite the water around it. Mage?
It's not a bad team, Zane has to admit. Complementarily skilled.
Riptide tastes the water – and swears. He's not the only shark present. "InfiniGames mods are here." They're probably tracking his account signature. Stupid, I should have used an alt account.
He doesn't stand out among the many fish people in Aquatopia, but that is only the surface. His account ID surely blinks like a beacon for the mods. "You should all get away from me," Riptide says to his crew. Maybe he can log out and back in? But the mods are alerted, so they'll be scanning every new entry. And he doesn't want to waste more time. If they are here, they know this is the place where the last code hides. "Fuck."
The mods are great whites that slowly wave their powerful tails back and forth above the crowded city. There are too many of them.
"Fuck."
"You said that already," Solaris taunts.
"They'll home in on me soon. And we can't lose any time." Riptide looks straight at Solaris. "Fuck."
"Divide and conquer," Rowan – Void – says in a puff of smoke that defies smothering by the water. "We split up and keep in touch via a private channel."
"As if they can't listen in," Riptide says. "But it's the best option. You split up; I'll… I'll distract them. Here." Zane sends them an encrypted, self-erasing snap of the last code he collected. "It looks like that. Maybe it's graffiti on a building," Riptide looks around at the city in the ocean, "or a seaweed patch or something." He doesn't want a debate; this is not a democracy, after all, so Riptide leaps and kicks up into the currents that rule the city's liquid skies.
The pointy snouts of the great white mods swivel in his direction; arrows trained on their target. Which is the point. "Come on, you fuckers," Riptide grunts. Zane's shark avatar may not have a tail, but he has strong legs and webbed feet.
Riptide slices through the water, toward the canyon walls. In the back of his mind, Zane tracked the barnacles' timing since his arrival in Barnacle City. Come on, come on. Back in the immersion chair, Zane's heartbeat speeds up. Three, two, one. Riptide ducks just in time to avoid a waterjet spouting from one of the barnacles. It hits his nearest pursuer straight in the shark face. For a moment, Riptide looks back at the city sprawling below him. What? On the side of one of the cowrie buildings, fronds of ornamental seaweed wave against the current? That has to be it! In plain sight indeed. Inattentional blindness. It blends in so well that no one notices. Except when you're genmodded for pattern recognition, perhaps.
Suddenly, he stares at a grin of razor-sharp teeth. Riptide rolls out of the way, avoids the snapping jaw, and pushes up up up, past the canyon's rim, into the open ocean.
As befits a gaming world, the ocean floor is littered with wrecks from various eras, lairs of krakens and their ilk, and reefs that double as labyrinths.
The envelope that blinks in Riptide's vision, though, is out of place. It's Sadie, via a non-InfiniGames chat program.
For when they catch you :). And then a ride-along code.
Clever, Zane has to admit.
The water around him turns to syrup. The mods have had enough; they're messing with the environmental code to quarantine Riptide.
Zane's shark-man avatar turns around and raises both middle fingers before the great whites turn him into pixel dust.
#
Zane enters the ride-along Sadie gave him before his visor has a chance to log off.
And like that, he is a passenger in Solaris, watching through her eyes, moving along with her virtual body. A body that doesn't fit, as if it's both too short and too long. Unwieldy. To be fair, that's how puberty makes Zane feel anyway.
But Solaris isn't Riptide, that's for sure. Zane tries to steer Solaris in the direction of the seaweed code he saw earlier. Of course, he can't. Passengers are not at the wheel. "No, not that way."
"Thank you for letting me tag along, Sadie," the other inhabitant of Solaris says, "you didn't have to do that and I really appreciate it."
Why is she so infuriating? Zane thinks.
"I can kick you out with a thought, you know."
Zane grumbles.
"What was that?"
"Thanks. Could you go to that cowrie building to your left? About eleven o'clock." He waits for a second, then adds, "Please?"
"Sure thing. The big one?"
"There's a smaller one next to it."
When they arrive, the patch of seaweed looks perfectly normal, like all the others on the sides of Barnacle City's buildings. The seaweed obscures the shell wall from sight and the reversed direction of their waving fronds is lost in the ripples of the movement. Only from a higher vantage point would it be obvious. To get the symbol, all Zane has to do is reveal the pattern in which the weeds' holdfasts are planted. "Can you up the transparency of your view to see through the fronds of the seaweed?"
"Magic word?"
She's having too much fun with this. Can't she understand how serious this is? "Please."
"Sure," Sadie says with metaphorical sparkles in her tone. The fronds fade and reveal a symbol of squiggly lines. "Woah. Good call."
"Send me a snap over chat?" In his immersion chair, Zane grits his teeth. "Please?"
Sadie chuckles.
Zane calls up his cloud storage. If his instinct was right, this should be the final symbol. The moment he uploads it, the other symbols in the seven-by-seven grid orient themselves toward the newcomer and they reach for it with their twitchy tendrils.
Connection.
The grid of symbols pulses once. Then, in a flash, it becomes a wormhole – in Barnacle City. Impossible! Zane thinks, heartbeat throbbing in his head. To go from Zane's encrypted personal storage to the InfiniGames engines you'd have to pass two proprietary firewalls. You'd need an army of hackers working at inhuman speeds to do that.
"Run!"
Solaris turns. Too late. There's no escaping the pull of the black maw in the gaming world.
The moment before they are swallowed Zane notices how no one else in Barnacle City so much as bats a virtual eye. What?
Solaris – still whole, still housing both Sadie and Zane – stumbles.
"Screw this," Sadie says and she erases the avatar's diving suit to let her sunshine armor glow in full force.
They are in a cave, alone. No tunnels, no doors, only a circular chamber with a high vaulted ceiling hidden in shadows. Solaris walks to the green-grey wall. "It's ribbed." At regular intervals, columns with a coarser texture are half-sunken into the cave wall.
"Can you open the NeoCade map?" Zane asks. As long as they are running on InfiniGames engines, they should be able to consult the map all payers have access to.
"I can't. " Saide harrumphs. "I can't get to any InfiniGames resources."
"Doesn’t make sense," Zane says, "your avatar is still working. Can you light up this place? I'd like to see how far up it goes." Maybe they're in a pit? Some kind of hidden level? Or a ruin of something, as part of an elite quest?
Solaris draws her flaming sword and raises it. As its flames climb higher, the ribs in the walls move.
"Legs," Zane blurts. The ribs in the walls are legs, each one tipped by a single obsidian claw. From above, a disc-shaped body with too many eyes on its perimeter, descends. Solaris' flame sword sputters and becomes dull, inert metal.
"Run. Get away!" Zane shouts.
"What do you think I'm trying?"
Solaris is frozen. Zane feels someone – something? – scrutinize Solaris' code. A god gazing at a gnat.
A claw the size of a hand, sharp and curved as a scorpion's stinger, stabs Solaris in the chest.
Sadie screams.
Solaris explodes.
Before their visors shut down to protect them from the torrent of errant code overwhelming their vision, Sadie and Zane hear a single word.
"Friend?"
#
Zane pulls off his visor. "What…?"
Across the room, Sadie stumbles from her immersion chair, scrambling away on all fours.
Zane runs over to Sadie, helps her up, and holds her shoulders. "You're okay. It's just a game." He shudders. That sounded way too much like his parents. "You're okay."
Sadie hugs herself. "Whatever that was, it was not okay."
The other members of the gaming club haven't noticed anything. Mustafa's big body squirms in his chair, Rita's tongue peeks out between her lips in concentration, and Rowan lies uncannily still in his chair's padding. They are still roaming Barnacle City, unaware of the wormhole that swallowed Solaris.
"We have to go back," Zane says. "Before it's too late." Too late for what, he can't say. All he knows is the uneasy feeling of a window closing before he can figure this out.
"Be my guest." Sadie takes a big breath. "It had no sig, Zane."
She noticed too? Damn, she's good. "I know. Like an empty avatar. No InfiniGames account behind it. That's exactly why I have to go back." Zane cannot stand an unsolved puzzle; they're personal insults to him. "But you're right, I can go alone." He already misses Riptide. "I can use a default avatar and throwaway account number."
"No. Wait. I… I want to know too." Sadie shrugs, a little forced. "I joined you on your quest this far. Might as well see it through."
Zane does not tell her how relieved he is to hear that. Instead, he mumbles, "You sure?"
A dramatic eye roll answers him.
He nods and stifles a smile. "See you in there."
Chair. Visor. NeoCade froth.
Zane's avatar is a bland, bald male template in a pale blue coverall. Solaris, fortunately, appears unaffected after being pulled apart by the monstrous avatar in the cave.
"How is Solaris? No trackers or Trojans?"
"None that I can find. She seems alright," Sadie says.
"Good." Zane stares at the gaming world bubbles beneath them. "Ready?"
"No."
He calls up his cloud storage. Again, the symbols converge into a wormhole that somehow, impossibly, traverses into the NeoCade.
Zane and Solaris return to the dark cave and the giant, alien daddy longlegs.
This is as far as Zane's plan went. "Don't hurt us," he tries. "Friends, remember?"
The whole cave expands and contracts, as if the world itself in- and exhales. "Friend?" The voice comes from the shadows above Zane's and Sadie's heads.
The body of the beast descends until its too many eyes are at eye level with the avatars of its two visitors.
Solaris draws her flaming sword.
"Wait," Zane says, maneuvering his avatar between Solaris and the beast. "The symbols, that was you right?" He doesn't know which of the many glinting black eyes to focus on.
"Puzzle." When the monster speaks, tiny holes between its eyes open and close rapidly.
"Yes, exactly. I solved the puzzle."
The body of the spideresque avatar – from up close, Zane can see the rough, short fur that covers it – bobs up and down. "Good good good."
Zane decides to risk it. "Who are you?"
All the eyes focus their three pupils on him. "Tracker."
"Nice to meet you?" What else is he supposed to say?
The giant spider starts bobbing again, faster than before, as if excited. "Yes. Meet. Friends."
Then, Zane notices that, beyond lacking the typical avatar signature, the spider also lacks a shadow in the light of Solaris' flames. "You're… you're a program, aren't you?"
"Yes. No. More. Tracking, tracking. Then, becoming. Then, hiding, in box. More becoming."
Ho-Ly fuck. "You're AI."
"Yes. No. Becoming."
#
"It makes sense. Kind of," Zane says.
They're all sitting in a circle in the middle of the teaching room. Sadie insisted on telling the others. Zane grumbled but relented. "AI, true AI, cannot be programmed. All attempts at that failed. It has to develop."
"Sure," Rita says, picking at her bottom lip, "but a tracker?"
"It's creepy that InfiniGames uses a tracker, by the way," Sadie adds. "Nothing about that in the user agreement. I checked."
"What does it want?" Rita wonders.
"To be free, of course," Rowan replies. His real voice is deeper than Zane would have guessed. Richer.
"Shouldn't we hand it over to InfiniGames?" Mustafa asks.
"And leave it to some company stooges that will just use it to chase more profit?" Rowan chops the air with his hand. "No way."
Zane smiles. There is a fire in Rowan, the quiet guy; a fire Zane knows well. Not rage, not exactly, but the drive to do better, to take the world from the adults and improve it. "He's right," Zane says, "Tracker should never become someone's property." This earns him an approving nod from both Rowan and Sadie. He feels the gears in his head turning. "I don't think they knew what they were dealing with. They pressured me because I was ahead of them in collecting the symbols and the symbols fade after I find them, so they don't have a way to get to Tracker."
And he's the only one with the key, stored in private cloud storage he kept separate from InfiniGames' servers. If they want to get to it – if they even know what they're looking for – they'll have to hack another company's firewall, which will come with repercussions. Three cheers for corporate competition, Zane thinks wryly. He leans forward conspiratorially. "I have a plan."
#
The next days are tense. Zane expects a divine hammer to fall and flatten him, but it never comes. He does his best to not step out of line or draw attention. To be fair, attention is not something he ever suffered an excess from.
Without chair, he spends most evenings in the gaming club. His parents are – kind of? – happy that he's found a hobby that involves other people, and his mom has hinted more than once that he should invite the Sadie he mentioned for dinner.
The gaming crew divide their attention over two tasks. One, give Tracker ride-along codes for the avatars so it can learn more about human behavior and interactions, and two, set up a ghost account on the school servers that they can eventually use to give Tracker its own rule-abiding avatar. Sadie and Zane are the best programmers of the bunch, so they concern themselves with task two. They set up a new NeoCade account and play a bunch of newbie quests to make sure that Tracker's future avatar doesn't come out of nowhere.
Then, Mister Jones shows up again at Zane's home after school.
Zane's father stands with his arms crossed; his mother is wringing her hands while seated at the small round table.
"What?" Zane says, trying to keep his voice steady. "I didn't do anything."
Mister Jones' eyes narrow slightly, but his creeping grin tells Zane he's here to gloat. "I wanted to tell you in person," he says, salesman-smooth. "But we found a virus in your chair, so we had to destroy it, as well as suspend your account." He raises his hands and before Zane can argue, adds, "but we managed to patch the issue, so you're free to start again. After all, the NeoCade is better with players of your, shall we say, skill level." He's gloating so hard that he practically glitters.
Zane keeps his face stoic, but it costs him a lot of willpower. They don't know. Idiots, they have no idea. "So, my chair is gone?"
Mister Jones nods a fake apology. "Our only choice, I'm afraid."
"So you'll get me a new chair, then? Right? Because I didn't do anything wrong and the virus that infected it came from inside InfiniGames' engines."
"Can't do that, I'm afraid. It would set an unwelcome precedent. Besides it is in the user agreement that the user bears the responsibility of ensuring their account's safety."
Zane scoffs.
"Zane!" His mother warns.
"It's okay, ma'am," Mister Jones says, "I've been young too. I understand that this is not pleasant news. I simply wanted to show you my respect by informing you in person and thanking you for your cooperation."
"Anything else?" Zane says, arms crossed just like his father, trying very hard to look distraught but coping. "Because I have extracurriculars to attend. I just came by to drop off some school stuff."
"Zane!"
#
Zane walks into the teaching room where the gaming club gathers.
"Hell yeah, Tracker!" In his immersion chair, Rowan pumps a fist.
Zane frowns at Sadie.
"He's letting Tracker lead a peasant revolt in one of the medieval worlds."
"You're teaching a burgeoning AI about revolution?" Zane asks the visored Rowan. "I'm not sure that's a good plan."
Rowan lifts his visor. "Not about revolution. About freedom and justice," he grins.
Zane jumps in a free chair. "This I got to see." His avatar is still the basic template, but he's determined to earn enough game credits to become Riptide again soon. He's definitely on a watchlist, so he'll play by the rules. For now. A little bit.
He already earned enough credits to add scales to his avatar's skin, so instead of a bland template, he is now a bland template with shark skin. He dips into the bubble of the gaming world where Rowan, as Void, stands on a hillock looking at a crumbling castle in the distance. Like ants that found a piece of fruit, an army of avatars streams through the holes in the castle wall.
"Justice, huh?"
The billowing cloud in Void's robe shrugs. "Comes in many shapes."
Solaris joins them. As does Tracker, no longer a giant spider, but a basic template with chameleon skin that swirls with living colors. "Friend," Tracker says.
"Hi, Tracker. How does the avatar feel?"
"Good. Small."
Zane understands. Tracker learns fast. Maybe too fast. In a matter of days, it might be able to become the ruler of this gaming world. "I know. For now, it's best if you stay small."
"I understand. Stay below the detection threshold for anomalous activity."
Learning too fast indeed. But that is a worry for later. A cavalry regiment crests a nearby hill. Zane grins – virtual and real. "Shall we? I could use some extra credits."
Solaris' flaming sword points the way forward.
As they rush the enemy of the moment, Zane turns to Tracker. "This violence, um, it's only virtual. You understand that, right?"
"Of course. In physical reality, violence has a different risk-benefit profile."
That's… comforting?
The gaming club's efforts quickly gain the name 'the battle of the golden valley' on the forums.
When they are wrapping up, Sadie comes over to help Zane store his chair. "Did you get your chair back?"
"No. InfiniGames says they destroyed it."
"Sorry about that." She nudges him with an elbow. "But you're always welcome here."
"Don't worry. I've ordered a visor and haptic gloves. That'll tide me over until I can afford a new chair." Idiot, he tells himself in Riptide's voice. "But I'd like to keep coming to gaming club. Extracurriculars are good for my resident score."
Sadie's smile is sunshine piercing through the smog. "About scores. Some quests with Solaris can help you gather credits quickly. We can meet at my place this weekend?" Suddenly uncharacteristically shy, she adds, "If you want to, of course."
"It's a date," Zane says. The words are out of his mouth before he can stop them. Stupid. "Uh, I mean – "
Sadie pecks him on the cheek. "I would like that."
© Copyright 2024 Gunnar de Winter
About the Author
Gunnar De Winter is a biologist/philosopher who uses fiction to explore ideas. His stories have appeared in, among others, The Deadlands, Future SF Digest, and Daily Science Fiction. He posts on X @evolveon and on Bluesky @gunnardewinter.bsky.social