Multiplayer (2 page)

“Yes, he does,” Malik went on, smiling in grim determination. “He sees much. But there is a way. It is said that to hide in the desert, one must become a grain of sand. Just as our great victory on nine-eleven used the decadent technology of the west as our weapon, so a new technology has arisen in America that will once again give us the advantage. You may not have heard of it before. A pastime of children. It is called a ‘massively multiplayer online game.’”

Ch. 1

Izaak squinted to sharpen his vision and took a deep breath to dampen the beating of his heart. He let it out in a slow, measured hiss, the way his father had taught him to do with a real rifle. He felt his hands steady as he moved
Vera’s
crosshairs squarely onto the pale, blue turban, just a tiny dot emerging from the enemy base at the other end of the level. One practiced squeeze of the sniper rifle’s ‘trigger’ and the figure dropped to the ground at the end of a long, wispy vapor trail that stretched the length of the ruddy gorge.
You Killed Mal-X
flashed in Izaak’s Heads Up Display.

“Yes!” Hector West punched the air from his seat on the family room couch, grinning at his character’s success. Then the words were gone, blocked by a bobbing blonde head that had appeared between him and the TV. “Halie! Get out of the way,” Hector yelled at the six-year-old. “You’re blocking my game.”

“I want to play,” his sister whined, setting her legs in a determined stance. Hector didn’t have time for this. His clan, the Reavers, was in the midst of a five-minute
Hostage
match – and counting on his character’s sniper abilities to rescue one of their own from enemy territory.

“You don’t even like
Omega Wars
,” Hector barked, trying to see around her, but she kept herself in front of the TV. Finally, he rose and shoved Halie to the side. She gave a wail, but Hector knew it wasn’t real. “Don’t be a baby,” he said. As he dropped back to the couch, his eyes stuck on the photo next to the TV. The happy family. His dad, in dress uniform, smiling out of it with his little sister tucked on his lap. Mom, with eyes full of life, beside his other sister. Hector standing next to his father… A pang of guilt shot through him, but then, the flashing words,
You Killed Mal-X
drew his eyes. The guilt evaporated into a stony hardness. Mal-X was going down.

On the screen, Izaak came back to life as Hector returned to
Omega Wars
. Across the digital battlefield his team – a half dozen huge mercs, like walking tanks, trudged up a ravine toward the enemy base. Izaak activated his refractive camouflage and climbed the canyon wall to his favorite spot, well shielded by rocks but with a view of nearly the entire map. He had to get there before Mal-X reappeared at the other end of the level.

“Izaak?” came the voice of his teammate Darxhan. “We’re taking fire. You in position?”

“Just a sec,” he said quickly, climbing the rocks. He’d been here a hundred times before. “Okay. I’m in.” But he was more concerned with finding Mal-X than covering his team. It took a moment to locate the pale, blue dot after Mal-X respawned, but an instant later the tiny figure collapsed at the end of another vapor trail. Hector smiled from where he sat on the couch. “Pwned!” he chimed, as the game growled
Double Kill!

“Dude?” came his merc comrade again. “We’re getting pasted!”

“Oh, sorry.” Using the telescopic sight on
Vera
, Izaak sorted through the melee at the enemy base and quickly eliminated two defenders, then went back to searching for Mal-X.

Mal-X appeared again, from another spot, and made it only a dozen steps before Izaak dropped him in mid-leap. Three kills already. He used the respawn delay to help his friends a little, but from the sound of their cries they needed him fully engaged. But this was more fun. And there would be other games.

One after another, the kills on Mal-X added up.
Vera
was amazing. There was no other sniper rifle like her. But Izaak got eliminated a few times, too. Their opponents were not stupid, and his initial position was well known by all serious gamers. He was taken out by a rocket once, and an enemy sniper twice, but each time he respawned, he moved to a new location and kept punishing Mal-X for wearing that turban, laughing as the game went from
Double Kill
, to
Triple Kill
, to
Killicious
, and beyond.

Eventually his team stopped calling for support. From the display he knew they were falling steadily behind but when the match time ran out, Hector sank into the couch with a satisfied smile. He arched his back, and cracked knuckles, which had grown stiff from the afternoon’s digital adventures. The Reaver’s, had lost but the
Omega Wars’
post-game report displayed on his flat-screen TV awarded Hector’s vanguard, Izaak Ersatz, the
Pwn Zwn
for his domination of Mal-X. He nodded with approval, seeing that his own rating had gone from a thirty-eight to a thirty-nine and that Mal-X had been dubbed the
Pwner
. “How about another one?” he yawned into the mic suspended near his mouth.

“What happened to you, man?!” exclaimed his friend Deion, known and feared in
Omega Wars
as the merc Darxhan. “We got our butts handed to us!” Hector glanced at the stats. He was the only one with a positive kill ratio.

“Seventeen kills on Mal-X?” exclaimed another team mate, Tyra Bell, who played as the vanguard T-Reg. “Were you griefing on that guy?”

“Little grudge-match,” Hector giggled, feeling guilty about hanging his friends out like that, but relishing the satisfaction of the victory. He glanced at the photo next to the TV. Dad would have understood.

Deion huffed and Hector could tell his friend was angry. “Well, next time you’re part of the plan, don’t run off like some choad.” Deion’s unaltered voice was about an octave higher than his alter-ego’s. “Well I got to go. Need to finish that algebra sheet.”

“It’s only eight-thirty.”

“You finished it yet?” Deion asked harshly. “It looks pretty hard. Polynomials.”

Hector frowned. He hated algebra. “I’ll do it later. How about a round of slayer?”

“See you tomorrow, Hector.” Deion’s avatar disappeared from the lobby.

“Ty?”

“You need to get a life,” T-Reg announced. A second later she dropped off too and, one by one, the other clan members signed off, leaving Hector the sole remaining Reaver in the digital lobby.

He was moving Izaak to a slayer lobby when he heard his mother’s voice call him from down the hall. His hands froze on the controller. “What!” he yelled back, hoping the sound would carry to the kitchen.

“Groceries,” came the muffled reply.

He glanced at the matchmaking lobby to make sure the game wouldn’t submit him to a new match without his confirmation, sprang over the back of the couch in a single bound, and raced through the dining room where homework lay scattered across the table, shot through the kitchen noting the grocery bags already collecting on the counter, and skidded into the garage where he collided with his older sister Helen.

“Nice of you to join us, game-boy,” she spat, pushing past him.

“We saved the heavy stuff for you, Hector,” said his mother from behind an armload of brown plastic bags. She gave him a tired smile.

With his biceps straining, he managed to stack everything into one load and stagger into the house where he dumped
it all onto the counter. His mother turned on the kitchen TV, already set to the news, before tackling the mounting pile of groceries. Halie trounced in dragging a ball of pink fluff by what had once been an arm. “Why doesn’t princess have to help?” Hector asked.

“She’s six, Hector,” Mom shot back. “And stop calling her that.”

“I was helping Dad when I was six.” The moment the words left his mouth, Hector knew he shouldn’t have said it. The whole family froze for an instant, as if silence would take back the words.

“You pushed a plastic bubble-mower around in the yard,” Helen snorted. She smoothed her long blonde hair as she settled back in at the dining room table, but she was watching Halie’s reaction from the corner of her eye.

“So,” said his mother in a strained voice, “how was school?”

“Boring,” he muttered. “We don’t learn anything useful. Just…”

A long, low wail from Halie stopped his words. His mom dropped to her knees and bundled the six year-old into her arms.

“Way to go, dork,” Helen muttered. “You just had to go and mention Dad. Now she’s going to cry for the rest of the night.”

“Why don’t you shut up?” Hector fired
out of the corner of his mouth. He hated this part of his life. Their dad was dead. Blown up in Iraq by an improvised explosive device. An IED. Thinking about it made his stomach tighten and his chest ache, but this tiptoeing around and pretending it didn’t happen was worse.

“Why don’t you make me,
prince
,” Helen countered.

Hector bowed up for battle when his mother turned around holding his little sister. The guilt that gripped him for an instant only made him angrier. Everybody needed to stop wallowing and move on. Like he had. Above his mother’s head, the television showed a charred and burning body lying on a dusty street somewhere in the Middle East. Below it, at the bottom of the screen, a stock-ticker rolled. Nothing had changed. Nothing ever changed. His dad had been right about that.

“Do you have homework?” his mother asked, stroking Halie’s hair and trying to sound upbeat.

“Most of it’s done,” said Hector attempting nonchalance, and his mother frowned all the more.

“You know the rules, Hector,” she scolded. “Homework before games.” It wasn’t going to work, and she knew it as well as he did. Not with Halie crying over Dad.

“Mom, the shrink said …”

Helen rolled her eyes but mom’s gaze had already dropped to the floor, and her voice lost any of its admonition. “Of course. I just would like you to get your homework done first … when you can,” she said softly and carried Halie out of the room.

“I can’t believe she buys that load,” his sister said in disbelief, and turned her attention to her endless stream of text messages.

Hector couldn’t believe it either. Not that his mom bought it – but that the shrink had. Mom had made them all go when they moved here after their father was killed. It was a waste of time. The guy wanted Hector to talk, talk, talk or cry like a baby – like Halie was now – and gave him a bunch of pills to dope him up. After the first one, he didn’t take any more. He didn’t want to go back, but the second visit went better than he ever could have planned. The prissy, balding shrink asked him why he wouldn’t take the anti-depressants.

“I don’t like feeling out of it,” Hector had explained. “That’s not me. I feel like I need to
do
something, not sit around zoned out. I can’t stand it. It’s like … I’d love to go get the bad guys who killed my dad and hurt them or kill them or something. But I can’t. I can’t do anything about it, and being too stoned to move makes it worse.”

“What makes it better?” the guy asked.

Hector had thought for a moment, at first uncertain what to answer, but then it leapt into his head. “
Omega Wars?
”

Those proved to be the golden words. The psychologist talked to him awhile longer, then told his mother that the game was a good outlet for Hector’s frustration – a place where he could act out what he couldn’t do in real life. The shrink actually
recommended
that Hector play every day. Unbelievable. So now, Mom bugged him to do his homework first, but when it came down to it, she wouldn’t refuse him an opportunity to go online and play. That made for at least one part of Hector’s life that was sweet. And while Mal-X had certainly played no part in his father’s death, pwning a guy in a turban had felt good. Very good.

Ch. 2

Hector slipped back onto the couch, hoping to squeeze in a quick match if anyone was around, but a message was waiting for him in the game. He clicked on the flag-icon at the bottom corner of his screen, opening a window that read:
Private message from Mal-X.