Nova Project #1 (4 page)

T
he coffee bar is silent as the final message scrolls across thirty pairs of lenses and for a few seconds after that. Then: the swell of noise, of too many voices speaking at once.

“A competition,” whispers Miguel. No one hears him, but it doesn't matter. They're all saying the same thing.

“That'll be different,” says Nick, Guardian of the Obvious. Miguel can't think about giving him shit for it.
Rewards that will make your current enhancements look like toys. Whether they have passed Level Twenty-five or not.

“Think it'll look like the normal game?” An endless stream of puzzles, quests, monsters to defeat. A fantasy world, born from the Gamerunners' imaginations. A Chimera. They'd named it well for more than one reason.

Maybe not endless, if the point of the competition is to have a winner.

Anna catches his eye and shakes her head. No. She never
answered him earlier, when he asked if she was his mother. He has one of those, and he already knows he's probably in for a discussion when he gets home. Maybe he should practice his arguments on Anna first, but he still looks away, around the room, for something that'll delay what he knows is coming. It's probably the only time since he was eleven that he's been happy to see Zack walking toward him.

“You entering, Mig?” Zack asks, curling a biomechatronic hand, the older brother of Mig's finger, the plastic composite flexing and bunching almost like real skin. “Hope you're ready to be disappointed.”

“We don't even know how they're choosing people yet,” Nick says, “but Mig kicks your ass at Chimera, and you know it. I've seen your updates. It took you how long to pass Thirteen?”

“You know why I have this?” Zack holds up his fist. “It's so that when I punch you, it doesn't hurt me.”

“Yeah, I'm entering,” Miguel says, realizing his mistake as soon as the words are out. Anna's sharp-again nails dig into his upper arm, her earlier promise to give it a rest tonight definitely abandoned now, the weight of her perplexed anger in her fingertips.

Better get it over with.

“Need permission from the girlfriend, huh?” Zack laughs, watching Miguel stand and move away with her. Miguel
ignores him, but Nick gets in a last dig as he pushes past Zack to follow them.

A light rain has started to fall, blurring neon edges. The false atmospheric layer above, thinning by the day, diffuses sunlight but isn't a solid bubble. The three of them gather in the doorway of the darkened store beside the coffee bar to shelter from the drops. They
say
the chemicals in the water are still at safe levels for skin, but they say a lot of things.

“Tell him he's crazy,” Anna says, glaring at Nick. “God knows he won't listen to me.”

“You're crazy,” Nick says dutifully. Miguel's jaw tightens. They met because of him, when all three were kids, and now they're joining forces? He opens his mouth, Nick cuts him off. “You're crazy, but not for the reason she thinks. Anna, if it were me, I'd be doing the same thing.”

“Then you're
both
crazy. His heart could crap out at any minute, but he spends all his time running around Chimera, shot up on adrenaline and endorphins and who knows what else buzzing around what passes for his brain, and now he's planning to do it more?”

“I'm still right here,” says Miguel through gritted teeth. “But I'm leaving. Please feel free to continue this without me because my presence is obviously not required.”

“Mig.” Her voice gentles. “Don't you know how much we worry about you?”

This is the thing she's never understood: that it's not nearly as much as he worries about himself, so it's not that he doesn't appreciate it, but it's all noise swirling around the piercing signal in his own mind. “Don't you know how much you wouldn't have to, if I can get a new heart through the game?”

“We should wait and find out more of the details,” says Nick. “The rewards might not help him anyway. There might not be any point.”

Rewards. That's what it's all for. All the best doctors are on Chimera's payroll, replacing skin and eyes and limbs and lungs with enhanced counterparts. Since video games began, and Miguel's studied their history more than most of the other things his teachers think he needs to learn, they've been based on a system of gathering items, enhancing the character to aid progression. Chimera has taken that, like everything else, and turned up the volume.

So he plays. Because even if he had the money, he can't find one who isn't working for the game that he'd trust to cut him open again. They're all back-street hacks with bandages and prayers. He's looked. His parents have looked. A couple of years ago they even petitioned the Gamerunners to be allowed to use the rewards they've earned on him, though he's not supposed to know that. They didn't tell him in case the answer was no. Which it was.

“You should be glad about this,” he says. Anna raises her
eyebrows in questioning challenge. “What would you rather, that I spend a couple months doing this or a couple years getting to the end of Twenty-five?”

“They said this would be more dangerous,” she protests.

“If I die trying, well, I was going to sometime anyway. We're
all
playing for our lives, turning ourselves into cyborgs bit by bit because robots stand a better chance on the planet than humans do. I'm just on a slightly accelerated time scale.”

Anna winces and turns away, gazing across the street at the last few drops of rain splashing into a puddle. He touches her shoulder. She's smart, it's one of the things he loves about her, but emotions aren't always. It'd taken him longer than it should've to realize she's human, a part of her had hoped she could fix his broken heart by loving him enough.

He's human, too. He'd hoped she could.

“Want me to take you home?” he asks.

She shakes her head. “I'll stay for a while.”

“Okay.”

Nick claps him on the back, and Miguel steps out onto the sidewalk, heading for the nearest hoverboard hub. The tiredness takes him like this, sudden and violent, but it wasn't the time to tell Anna that, or to admit he doesn't have the energy to walk home. A few blocks away, a line of the silver disks, locked on their edges in a steel rack, curves like the lashes of a blinking eye.

Always watching. Nothing anyone does is hidden, invisible.

He types a code on the keypad at the end, and the screen lights up.
ANDERSON, MIGUEL. PAYMENT ACCEPTED
. The latch on the nearest board clicks open, and it rises, flips, waits a few inches above rain-slick concrete.

“Higher,” he tells it. It drifts to waist height, its surface molded to allow for sitting or standing. Not that seeing little old ladies surfing the air currents isn't its own kind of funny, but not everyone wants to do it.

Great, he's become his own grandmother. Excellent. But he sits anyway. “Registered home address,” he says, and it takes off.

A competition. Winners. Prizes. It would be cool to win, and here, coasting on a breeze freshened by toxic rain, he spares a second of time to think about it. The whole world knowing how good he is at Chimera. That would be pretty awesome, but if he has to choose, he doesn't care as much about winning as he does about living. That's why he spends so much time in the Cubes to begin with. The biomech enhancements help in the game, sure, but they aren't shed with the protective clothing, sensors, visor at the end of a session. Outside, under a burning sun in thinned, poisoned air, those same enhancements are every human's best shot.

Level Twenty-five. He can see it looming ahead, almost
feel what it'll be like to call up the overworld and see its icon waiting for him to open it and step inside. One boss later, he can choose whatever he wants from the entire list of what the doctors are capable of, his reward for making it a quarter of the way through the game. There's never been a question of what he'll choose.

But now . . .

As he'd said to Anna, he could spend two months in the competition, get his heart, and get his life back. A life he'd spend in the game because it's better than the real world, but a real
life.
Running around, earning all the enhancements he wants instead of unnecessary surgeries being too dangerous to risk. He could even try to be the first person to beat the game completely.

The soles of his shoes brush the tops of the trees, the leaves rustling realistically enough to pretend they're growing, living things. He's never seen any of the few remaining forests; in this city, as in all of them so far as he knows, trees are merely glorified pixels.

Nice, though. Something to look at. He's not sure whether caring that things
look
pretty is the best use of the government's time, but then he checks himself in a mirror before he leaves the house, so maybe he can't judge.

The hoverboard loses height by inches, a familiar rooftop sliding into view like the next cutscreen. By the time it stops
outside his house he just has to point his toes to touch solid ground. Cargo delivered, the hoverboard whizzes off to plant itself back at its hub for recharging as the lock on the front door responds to the touch of Miguel's artificial finger. The finger is useful, but he got it because his parents insisted. He would've gone for something else, an eye camera possibly, but they'd said that if he was going to play, he needed to keep track of his heart rate and not just guess. Every time he measures, it's transmitted to them, too.

“Mom? Dad?”

No answer. Either asleep, out together, or in a Cube. Neither takes it as seriously anymore as Miguel does now, but there's still a tiny wasp-sting of envy that they're both further on in the game than he is. That they've been playing longer, the game having been introduced to their generation, is kind of a weak excuse. He's looked back in their Presences, they both were great players when they were younger. But now . . .

His dad sometimes goes for a walk in his slippers and often comments on news articles online, for god's sake. Anyone who does that should be beatable at a video game.

More out of laziness than electricity conservation, he feels his way to his room in the dark. There a faint glow from his computers illuminates a mess. Clothes, most of them earned in the game, cover the floor more thoroughly than the unseen carpet underneath. Sprawling on an unmade bed, he blinks
to activate his feed again and reads a random selection of messages, everyone talking, guessing, debating what the Gamerunners have planned and how they'll choose the teams. Everyone certain he or she will be picked.

“Good luck,” he whispers into the darkness, unsure if he's saying it to them or himself. It's a little more than ten hours until the Gamerunners deliver their next updates, and while he'd like to stay up to count down the minutes, the day has taken its toll. He sends out an update to his friends, as if any of them care that he's falling asleep, and folds the glasses away.

Seen from overhead, Anna, Nick, and Miguel form a triangle on the not quite natural green of the grass, Nick's hair an especially incongruous splash. The roof over the park lets in the kindness of sunlight with none of its cruelty, glinting off composite leaves, plants, flowers that change and die with the seasons outside. There's some cool software behind that, but again it feels pointless, the focus wrong.

All around the three of them, people are gathered in similar groups, talking and reading their feeds at once, a festival of multitasking. Miguel can't hear them, but he can guess. The subject is the same everywhere.

“It's like one of those personality tests,” says Anna. “I took one online once.”

“Did it say you're a pain in the ass?” asks Nick. “Ow.”

Anna rubs her elbow. “You have bony ribs. Eat a cheese-burger.”

“That's not very ecoconscious of you.”

“You two.” Miguel shakes his head. He could say more, but a new status distracts him. Zack, digging at him again. It's been constant since the Gamerunners last updated.

“Personality test. Yeah, kind of, I guess,” he says finally. Next week almost anyone who wants to will be able to choose an entirely new level, designed to assess them all as competitors. It's open to any Chimera gamer who has passed Level Ten, probably as more of an age than a skill cutoff. Most people hit that around sixteen. He hit it a month after his fourteenth birthday.

“So a week to play this weird level. Another for the medical exams, then the selection.”

“Mig—”

“I know,” he says to Anna. “Let me play the level first. Who knows, they might not like my style there, or however they're judging that, and the medical won't even matter. Look at it like this: I'm going to spend next week in a Cube anyway, so doing it playing a level a toddler could pass is healthier than the normal game, no?”

Winning an argument with her, even a small one, is rarer than his heart condition. He grins at her glare.

“That's the part that doesn't make sense to me.” Nick twirls
a blade of fake grass between his fingers. “They've never made us pass a health test before, and the normal game is hard, physically. Why now?”

“Because everyone's going to be watching, duh,” Anna answers, taking the words from Miguel's mouth, adding more of her own. “Even more than they are now. Yeah, sure, your friends follow your progress, maybe other gamers in Paris or Shanghai or wherever if you're on the same level, but this is different, the Gamerunners said so themselves. They're putting on a show. Someone dies from exertion in an anonymous booth in a Cube somewhere, big deal. Who's going to notice or complain? Their families? We're not forced to play. But someone kicks it during this competition and Chimera's in trouble.”

“Yeah.” Miguel blinks away another stupid jab from Zack. “Too many people complain to the government that Chimera's dangerous, and they can kiss good-bye to the tax breaks I'm sure they get for keeping us all amused and out of trouble. And healthier than we'd probably be otherwise. Chimera makes us exercise, see doctors regularly for upgrades . . .”