Slum Online (2 page)

I punched the capoeirista as his body rebounded.
Cancel,
punch. Punch, kick, cancel, heel drop. Crouching punch. Speed
dash. Cancel. Low foot sweep.
When it was over, the crumpled ruin of Tetsuo’s opponent lay on the ground, motionless. A moment later, he vanished from the screen. My hands moved to the keyboard.

> Out of your league, scrub.

Versus Town existed online, its only access a game console hooked up to the Internet. To move, you had the stick and buttons on the controller. To talk you had a keyboard, and to see, you had a TV screen. That was it.

There was no electricity in Versus Town. No gas lines or water mains. People who lived in a digital world never grew thirsty. They never felt cold, they never cooked. No one had to turn on the lights in a world made of light. There wasn’t a single convenience store, movie theater, or ballpark. At night, sometime between ten o’clock and five the next morning, I log in and Tetsuo comes to Versus Town. A make-believe man in a make-believe city. He was new there, and he had come for one thing: to fight.

Versus Town
was an online fighting game that used the Internet to bring together players from around the world. They fought each other using their controllers to manipulate the characters on the screen. No two characters were alike. Their polygonal bodies moved with supernatural precision motioncaptured by state-of-the-art technology from real martial artists. Polygonal warriors for a polygonal world.

The digital shops and houses, light poles and trash cans, glimmering cel-shaded and textured signs—all this meant nothing to the people who lived in Versus Town. They ran the streets in search of their next battle. Their arms were made to punch, their legs to kick. Even their heads were weapons; no thoughts flitted behind their lifeless eyes.

The capoeirista a fading memory, Tetsuo ran down Main Street toward the arena—a route he could have navigated blindfolded. That was where everyone would be.

Tetsuo pushed open a door of frosted glass and stepped into the arena. A poster advertising the upcoming second season tournament hung on the marble-textured wall. The tournament was scheduled to open the last week of June, less than a month away. Tetsuo would be entering, and he meant to win.

Tetsuo headed for a private training room at the edge of the arena where he proceeded to practice his combo moves on a wooden sparring dummy. His usual pre-fight warm-up. Countless characters were engaged in matches in the fighting rings at his back. There were fighters from every school imaginable: snake boxing, wrestling, drunken fist, and sumo, to name a few.

Two characters stood at the far right edge of my screen, not fighting, but chatting. Whoever they were, they knew their way around a keyboard; the text in the bubbles over their heads scrolled by in a blur. They were standing a good distance away, so the words appeared somewhat squished, but I could still make them out.

> Probably a snake boxer.

A gaudy T-shirt was textured across the man’s chest. His stance labeled him a karateka like Tetsuo. The other character was a lightweight fighter, probably a jujutsuka. He wore a white sparring suit with a brown, pleated hakama skirt that hung from his waist. On his feet were a pair of straw sandals the color of fresh-cut grass.

> Probably?

The karateka’s answer bubbled onto the screen.

> Nobody knows for sure.

> He really that good?

> They say he beat one of the top four.

> Who?

> 963.

The “top four” wasn’t an official distinction in Versus Town, but it carried such weight that it may as well have been. As far as the players were concerned, the four best characters in the game were Pak, a snake boxer; Keith, a capoeirista; Tanaka, an eagle claw stylist; and 963, a jujutsuka. But it was Pak who outshone all the rest. He had won the first season tournament with barely a scratch. Beating Pak was the dream of every player in Versus Town.

I gave my hands a rest and turned my attention to their conversation.

> Can’t you just ask him who it was?

> I did.

> And?

> He was alone over in Sanchōme when he got ganked. Never saw who it was.

The mysterious character stalking Sanchōme was a common topic these days.

> PK?

> Everyone’s a PK in VT. It was just another street fight.

> Why doesn’t he try for a rematch?

> This guy’s way too good.

> He can’t be all that.

> We’re talking Lord British tough. No one’s ever beat him.

> Maybe it was some kind of script?

People paid a monthly fee to play
Versus Town
, so the players were more than players, they were customers. Scripted events were one trick the game developers used to keep customers entertained and online. But the karateka was clearly unconvinced.

> Nah, I’m telling you, it wasn’t a script.

> I’d like to see him for myself.

> He only fights the best. If you’re not in the top ten, he won’t give you the time of day.

> I don’t buy it. They’re losing players, so they wrote some script to stir up some talk is all.

> /shrug Maybe.

> One of the top four’s a snake boxer, right?

> Yeah.

> Then it must be him.

> It’s a different character.

> So maybe he’s playing an alt. He’s the same school.

> 963 said he played different.

> You can’t tell from one fight. A fight he lost, by the way.

> True that.

> So why’s he ganking people?

> Maybe he likes taking the piss out of players who think they’re masters of the universe.

> Why all the secret ninja shit?

> That way if he loses, nobody knows it’s him. He’s not embarrassed on his main.

> Makes sense.

> Good enough for me.

> You’re probably right.

I found myself staring blankly at the screen. A chime sounded, warning me I’d been inactive, and I realized their conversation had ended.

Light spilled from the TV into my dimly lit room. The digital clock on my DVR read 11:45. The air had grown damp, and my hand was uncomfortably warm where my palm met the stick. The karateka and his jujutsuka friend had long since logged out.

I heard a
tap tap tap
on the roof, rhythmic and faint. Rain. Outside the street was quiet, the wail of the police siren a distant memory.

For some reason, I couldn’t get the snake boxer from Sanchōme out of my head. Tonight’s score: 42 wins, 0 losses, 3 ties.

CHAPTER 2

IT WAS RAINING. There was more wet in the air than air, making it difficult to breathe. The water that had soaked through my shoes leeched warmth from the tips of my toes. There was a growing puddle, a shiny disc of reflected fluorescent light, beneath my umbrella where it leaned against the desk.

I sat in a small classroom, two seats from the dingy wall at the back of the room, staring up at the flickering fluorescent light overhead. The patter of raindrops against the windows. The squeak of chalk on the blackboard. Whispers that died before you could guess where they’d come from. It all formed a pastiche of sound FX over the music playing in my headphones.

My logic instructor, Professor Uemura, loved tracking attendance. It was a real fetish of his. He would hand out cards at the start of each class and collect them after the bell rang to dismiss us. If you brought the card with you, you could show up right before class ended to turn it in for full credit. The trick was having the right card; he used about twenty different kinds. So despite the fact it was the first period on a Monday morning, the classroom was full.

Most of the students sat hunched over their desks, dutifully transcribing the lecture notes from the blackboard to their notebooks. A handful of people were lower still on their desks, busy trying to make up for the sleep they’d lost getting to class. I was the only one in the room looking up at the ceiling. I stifled a yawn. Professor Uemura continued scribbling on the board. He could crank out a page’s worth of notes every two minutes. The man had a real gift for writing on a blackboard. Some of his lectures came dangerously close to filling up twenty pages.

On the desk in front of me were a limp sheet of wide-ruled loose-leaf paper and a blue attendance card. The paper was only a quarter full. Five minutes in I’d given up on the whole thing. The real mistake was embarking on such a noble endeavor in the first place. In the time it took me to write down one character, he’d written somewhere between three and five. For each line I copied down, he got another two lines ahead. When the eraser came sweeping down in a remorseless arc over the words I was still struggling to copy, I knew I was done with my mechanical pencil for the day. Since then I’d been lost in the world of portable music.

Had I known this professor would be such an attendance Nazi, I’d never have taken the class. My friends had lured me in with assurances of easy credits. Sure, all you had to do was show up. But showing up meant subjecting yourself to ninety minutes of paint-dryingly boring lectures.

I flicked my mechanical pencil with my index finger. It spun across the palm of my hand, slick with humidity and sweat, rotating about 45 degrees too far before it went tumbling across the loose-leaf paper to land on the desk with a hard clatter. The guy in the chair in front of me shifted slightly in his seat. The fluorescent lighting cast a pale green shadow on his shirt. I felt a faint breath of warm air caress my cheek under the weight of the stagnant air.

I hated rain. Elementary school had been a string of field trips played out against a backdrop of rainy days. Our athletic meets were regularly rained out and rescheduled from the weekends to Wednesdays. The first time I worked up the courage to tell a girl I liked her, an unseasonal typhoon was roaring outside. I later broke up with said girl during a driving rain that fell all day. On the day I learned I failed the college entrance exam, and a year later when I finally passed it, a drizzle so fine it fell like mist from a humidifier blanketed the city. I’d even heard from my mother that on the day I was born, a nasty day in late June right in the middle of the rainy season, the air had been a thick pea soup, damp and clinging.

So I was generally unpleasant on mornings during the rainy season. That I had previously acquired the particular variety of attendance card handed out today—and thus had shown up at the beginning of class for nothing—did nothing to lighten my mood.

“This seat taken?” It was a soft sound, barely enough to derail my train of thought. I looked up from the desk. “Your bag. It’s taking up a seat.” She took a deep breath, chest rising, falling. The gentle curve of her bangs brushed restlessly against her forehead. A steady stream of pinky nail–sized water drops dribbled from the tip of the umbrella clutched in her right hand.

I pulled the earbud from my left ear.

“Can I sit here?” she mouthed more than spoke. Her voice had the saccharine squeak of an anime character.

I glanced around the room. Pairs of long, rectangular desks stretched from just in front of the lectern to the back of the classroom. Each desk sat three people, and they were all full. All, that is, except the seat next to mine.

I moved my bag out of the seat. The girl gave a quick nod of thanks and sat down. I restored my headphone to its place in my left ear, and the music blossomed from tinny monaural to full and vibrant stereo. Resting my chin on my hands, I resumed my observation of the fluorescent lights.

Fluorescent lights flicker off and on at a rate of something like fifty or sixty times per second. I read somewhere that there’s a tiny little man who runs electricity through the mercury vapor inside the tube to make it glow. When the light flickers, it’s the little man catching his breath. And when the light gets old and starts randomly blinking off and on, well, that’s the little man’s fault too. Sometimes I wonder if it would be possible to see each individual cycle of light—on off, on off—the way swordsmen in samurai novels can peer through each individual drop of rain as it falls from the eaves of a roof. There are people who can push a button sixteen times per second, so why not?