The NextWorld 02: Spawn Point (19 page)

Raev answers for him. “He still has a hard time with... violence.”

I speak before I think. “This is just NextWorld, not-”

“It doesn't matter,” Raev says. “It wasn't supposed to be real in your game either, but it was. He was in a very real coma.” She rubs the back of his neck with her hand. “At first meditation and the Omniversalist lessons were enough, but when you fell into a coma too...”

Xen slides another Dizzy Fizz into his mouth. His eyes roll back in his head.

I've heard of post-virtual trauma disorder before, but I always figured the people who suffered from that already had something wrong with them. Maybe they couldn't distinguish reality from virtual reality. Or maybe it was too much like something that happened in the real world.

When Xen shakes in his chair, I'm scared for him. Is this what empathy feels like? Weird.

“Sorry,” Fantom says, like the word doesn't hold any weight.

“It's okay,” Xen says, his voice shaking as much as his body. “It's no big deal. I'll get over it.”

“You don't need to do that,” Raev says, her back stiffening with an imbued strength. “You don't need to act like this is something you should be ashamed of or that you have to hide. It wasn't just a game. Something very real happened to you. It affected your body.”

“It affected his mind,” I say.

I can tell Raev is ready to argue, to defend her partner. I throw up both my hands to let her know I'm not looking for a fight.

“I mean, you're not wrong. It affected his body too. But it's his mind that's hurt. And that's no different in here... or out there. One affects the other.”

Raev stares at me for a few seconds before I can visibly see her accept my words. Her body softens. She closes her eyes.

“You're right, Arkade. Metaversalism teaches us that who we are is not our physical form, but our hearts and our minds. Our soul has no location, it simply is.” She looks at Xen with a delicate smile and says, “Your friend is pretty wise for a non-believer.”

Xen smiles at me and says, “He believes more than he knows.”

I ignore the meaningless philosophical babble and turn to Fantom. She's swiping through screens in front of her, searching for something with driven intent.

“What is it? What's happening?”

She squints her eyes, reading something on her screen as she says, “He's here.”

We all sit up a little straighter and scan the room, but nothing has changed. The skeleton in the corner is still taking bets for the racing game. A tall, powerful amazon-looking woman is still ignoring the advances of an elf in a leather jacket. The cyborgs are still discussing something with the robots near the jukebox. An obscenely large man still sits at the bar, his avatar almost completely enveloping the bar stool underneath him, and a circle of scantily clad women are still whispering in his ear. The door hasn't opened. Nobody has entered or exited.

“I don't see him,” I say as I continue to search.

I'm not looking at Fantom, but I'm sure she rolls her eyes before she says, “That's because you're
lookin'
for him when you should be l
istenin'.”

“Listening? To what?”

She closes all the screens in front of her with one huge swipe and points in the air. “The song.”

I listen for a few seconds to the instrumental dance beat before I ask, “What about it?”

“It's his song,” she says. “He rides audio-casts.”

“He travels through sound?” Xen asks, both confused and impressed.

“I told you, it's all the same. Graphics, audio, touch, taste, smell, whatever. Once you break it down, you can use it however you want.”

I blink my eyes a few times to adjust to what I'm seeing. An avatar turns toward us as if he's a two-dimensional paper cut-out that I couldn't see from the side, but as he finishes the turn, he appears to be completely three-dimensional. His faceless avatar is wearing a black and white tuxedo with a red bow tie. His long white hair hangs far below his waist, each strand moving like a prehensile tendril.

“Fantom.” He says her name with a smooth, silky tone to his voice. “Are these your friends?”

I'm surprised he doesn't look at our social screens, but I guess in a place like this, you learn not to believe what you read.

“Xen, Raev, Arkade,” she says before uncomfortably clearing her throat and motioning toward the faceless avatar. “This is Worlok.”

Worlok opens up his hand and a chair slides across the floor toward his waiting grip. He spins it around and sits down next to me, uncomfortably close. I push my chair away from him and a smiling mouth appears for only a second on the blank face of his avatar

“You're
the
Arkade?”

I shrug my shoulders and say, “Uh. I guess?”

“Congratulations. You shot up to the top of the DOTgov Most Wanted List this morning.”

“No worries, yo,” Fantom says. “I logged him in on a clean account.”

His smile flashes again, this time at Fantom. “I have to say, I didn't have much faith you'd be able to contact him under government lock down. Someday you'll have to show me how you pulled that off.”

I can't help wondering what someone like him would do with the power Fantom wielded over my nanomachines during my breakout.

“We need your help.” Fantom says, redirecting the conversation away from her hacking skills. She bites her lip and closes her eyes like it's painful for her to say, “
I
need your help.”

He leans back in his chair. “
You
? Need
my
help? I don't think I've ever heard you say those words before, much less twice in one week. Let me take a second here to appreciate this moment. I think I might-”

“We need to get into the Trash Bin.”

Even without eyes, I feel his avatar's stare burning into Fantom as an uncomfortable silence hovers around the table. Xen, Raev, and I look back and forth, waiting to see which one of them will break first. When neither says anything for far too long, I break the silence.

“We're trying to find a game world that DOTgov deleted. We have the location code, but-”

He slaps his hand over my mouth, looks over his shoulder to see who's close enough to hear him and whispers, “Not here.”

Without so much as a twitch of his wrist or a screen asking for our permission, the club drops away from us. We're instantly teleported into a mansion without dimensional rules. Stairways line the walls, changing direction if I look at them differently. Windows look through other windows in the same room from a different perspective. Up can be down and down can be left if I tilt my head a bit. My brain tries to wrap itself around the programming logic needed to code something like this, but my stomach twists itself into knots, throwing off my equilibrium. Twenty or so avatars sit around the room, their chairs resting on walls and ceilings. They're all manipulating screens in front of them, lost in the depths of thick code.

“Wow,” Raev says, “how insane was the person that designed this place?”

Xen's mixed up eyes accept his surroundings better than any of us. “It would make for a great sermon location. We could put a DJ booth over there...”

Fantom glances around the room. “It's been a while since I've been inside Sektor's coding room.”

“You blocked my invitations.”

“Yeah,” she says firmly. “I did.”

He doesn't sound happy. “But you didn't have any problem asking me for help when you needed to-”

“I was desperate,” Fantom says, cutting him off.

“Good thing I'm so nice.”

“Sure,” she says, cracking her knuckles, “if you want to go with that, I'll play along.”

“But now you show up expecting yet another favor from me? Just like that? I'm nice, Fantom. But I'm not that nice.”

Fantom rolls her eyes. Apparently there
is
someone who can annoy her as much I do.

“You've been inside the Trash Bin before.”

“That was a long time ago. And it was an accident.”

“You accidentally hacked into a secret domain?” Raev asks, her excitement overwhelming her ability to realize her place in the conversation.

“I was looking for a backdoor into a DOTbiz site and I stumbled across a weird connection.” Worlok explains to Raev. “But they detected the intrusion right away and locked it down.” He turns to me and says, “It took some serious skills for me to get away clean.”

Fantom raises an eyebrow skeptically. “You're tellin' me you found a way in, a long time ago, all by yourself, but now you can't do it with an entire team of hackers helping you?”

He stares at her as if he's deciding whether to tell the truth.

She steps closer to him and places her hand on his chest. “This is important, yo.”

It looks like he's getting lost in her sad eyes for a second, but he pulls himself away. “I'm not going to waste my time on a hack like that just to steal some game.”

She steps toward him, shaking her head. “We're not stealin' some deleted game. We're tryin' to save somethin' that's... that's...”

“What?” he asks softly when he realizes she's not just being dramatic to fake the importance. “What are you trying to save?”

“It's not
what
we're trying to save,” I say. “It's
who
.”

His head tilts with even more confusion.

Fantom grabs his chin and turns it back toward her. “The game that trapped me. DangerWar 2. I know you've read about it.”

He looks at me and then flashes Fantom a devious smile, like he knows a dirty little secret that amuses him.

“Yeah. I
may
have heard of it.”

“Then you know the rumors. The artificial intelligence...”

“Yeah. They said it was so advanced it actually fooled some players. Big deal.”

“It's not like that, yo. It wasn't foolin' them. It was learnin' from them.”

I can hear the recognition as he repeats, “Learning?” He glances at us again, searching each of us, trying to find one of us that doesn't believe what she's saying. There's a calm honesty on all our faces. We patiently wait for him to catch up to the truth.

“You're telling me that you think an NPC in that game acquired artificial consciousness?”

“Not one. Thousands, yo.”

Another fact slaps him in the face. He mentally stumbles for a second as Fantom keeps talking, trying to keep him on the track that she wants him to be on.

“Think about that, Worlok. Think about what something like that could mean for the powers-that-be. Think about what it could mean to the public that believes DOTgov can control NextWorld. This is the ultimate show of information freedom. They're tryin' to delete the most important data ever created, because
they
can't control it.”

He continues to deny her line of thinking. “Even if I could get you in... you have no idea how big that place is, how much stuff users delete every day. You'd never find a single, specific game in time.”

“We have fourteen hours,” she says, gesturing toward him to share the same timer that's sitting in the corner of all our views.

He replies condescendingly, “You don't get it. You'd never be able to find-”

“And we have the location code.”

“How did you-”

“I got a guy,” she says with a smile.

Worlok stiffens. “A
guy
?”

Fantom rolls her eyes. “It ain't like that. He's just a guy. But he's legit, yo.”

“Yeah. I'm sure he is.”

Something changes in Worlok. I don't understand it. It's so sudden. He steps away from Fantom, crossing his arms and acting smug again.

“Please, Worlok.”

“Fine, Fantom. I'll get you a hack,
again.
A nice little doorway into the Trash Bin.”

She doesn't seem convinced, but she says, “Thank you. I appreciate your-”

“But this time it's going to cost you.” I hear him smack his lips together, even though his face has no mouth. “Let's say... 250,000 credits. And that's the friend discount.”

She jerks her head back with a look of surprised confusion, like he's speaking in a different language.

“Credits? You want
credits
?”

“Yeah, Fantom. I want credits. You think I'm going to hand over another hack because you show up and bat your eyelashes? Think again, girl. Your avatar ain't
that
cute.”

The muscles in her arms flex as she squeezes both hands into fists. “You pompous little...” She takes a deep breath. “This has never been about credits for you, yo. This is about the revolution. This is about stickin' it to DOTgov and exposin' the truth.”

Worlok lifts his hands and shrugs his shoulders. “Yeah, well, what can I say? Revolutions are expensive.”

“You know I ain't never been a thief, yo. If you think I'm goin' to be stealin' from bank accounts for you-”

“No,” he says firmly. “I need clean credits.”

“Clean? Where are you expectin' me to come up with 250,000 credits?”

He turns away. “I don't care. Maybe you can ask your 'guy.'”

The inside of Sektor's warped code room drops away and we're slammed back into Club L33T. We're all sitting around the same table. Except for Worlok.

“He seems real great,” I say to Fantom. “I can see why you partnered up with him. You two are a lot alike.”

“Shut up.”

“He still has feelings for you,” Xen says. “Maybe if you just-”

“I said:
Shut up
.”

Raev leans forward and whispers, “Where are we going to come up with that many credits?”

“What about your mother?” Fantom asks. “Would she lend you credits if you asked real nice-like?”

“Sure,” Raev says. “All I have to do is renounce my religion, end my partnership, and get a job at InfoLock. Then maybe...”

“What about you?” I ask Xen. “Your church looked like it was bringing in a pretty steady tithe from your congregation.”

“Sorry, Kade,” he says weakly. “You know if I could, I'd give you every last credit I have, but it doesn't work that way. I don't have direct access to the account. Every credit I spend requires verification by the church to ensure there's no corruption. What comes in to the church, I have to spend on the church. Nothing else.
I'm
not rich. The church is.”