Cast of Shadows - v4 (33 page)

Sam slid out of bed and the sleeping girl spread her arm dreamily across the sheet to fill the divot in the mattress he’d left behind. He slipped down the hall to a guest room he’d converted into an office and opened his laptop. The screen brightened at his touch, as if it were glad to see him.

He clicked an icon for Shadow World and the game loaded, unspooling copyright notices and legalese and an animated intro, which he skipped after only a few frames. Recognizing him, and noting the time, the screen revealed an aerial shot of Chicago at night, the point of view soaring in off the lake and between buildings heading north. The game was plugged in to the National Weather Service so the Chicago on-screen was enjoying the same cloudless weather as the real city outside. In a matter of seconds Sam could see the steel-and-glass exterior of his own building, and then up, up, up thirty-nine stories to Sam’s home-office window. The on-screen point of view then entered the apartment as if the glass in the window had dissolved like sugar candy.

Sam donned a headset and manipulated the POV until it was identical to the one from his desk. He walked his avatar down the hall and looked in on the sleeping woman in his bed, his gaming persona, naturally, being as promiscuous as he was in real life. He had Shadow Sam go to the walk-in closet and put on a pair of khaki cargo pants and a black turtleneck. Shadow Sam walked quietly from the bedroom to the kitchen. He opened a drawer and removed a long knife, which he wrapped in a dish towel and placed in one of his roomy side pockets. He left the apartment and took the elevator to the garage and found his BMW in its assigned spot (his Shadow car had been stolen once, but it had been insured). He drove north along Shadow Lake Shore Drive. There was little traffic and he rolled the top back. The speedometer on his dash was frozen at sixty miles per hour, about fifteen over the speed limit. In his earpiece, the car hummed through the whistling night air. An old pink eyesore of a building appeared on the horizon and as he passed it he remembered reading that its real owners had managed to have its landmark status revoked and planned its demolition for later in the week. Sam wondered how up to speed the Shadow World coders could be and made a note to have Shadow Sam drive this way on Friday to see if the pink building were still part of the game.

He exited LSD at Fullerton and drove west, away from the lake. The white moon disappeared into the canopy of tall buildings and trees in Lincoln Park. He turned northwest on Lincoln and passed a bar called the York, which had a 4 a.m. license. He circled, found a parking spot, and walked back to the bar. The inventory panel on his screen reminded him of the contents of his pocket: one wallet, $300, one knife, one dish towel.

The York was crowded but a couple abandoned their seats at the bar, and Shadow Sam took one. He ordered a beer, left a fifty on the counter, and turned around to scope the room. Youngsters, hipsters, a desegregated mix of straight and gay. A pair of girls danced together to the jukebox Rolling Stones. They were both blonde and shapely and pretty in a cartoon way, as most everyone was in the game, save the True-to-Lifers. Sam took pride in the fact that his icon looked a lot like him. In fact, last year, when he was stuck in a gymless Saint Louis hotel and gained five pounds in a week, he updated his avatar with the extra weight. That kind of honesty was unusual among gamers.

He watched the girls dance for a while, their hips swaying and arms lifting in a repeatable programmed loop based loosely on the hustle, and then he asked if he could buy them drinks. He stood up and offered them his chair as well as the stool next to it. The bartender made more change from what remained of the fifty.

Their names were Donna and Lindsay. No one handed out his or her last name in Shadow World, except the hard-core True-to-Lifers or people looking to start a relationship. He said he was Sam.

“Lindsay, that’s a nice dress,” he said into the headset microphone. According to conversation protocol, gamers used the name of the person being addressed when there was more than one person within listening distance, or in the “halo of conversation.”

“Sam, thanks. I bought it at Saks.” That is, she bought it with Shadow dollars at the Shadow Saks Fifth Avenue. Lindsay put her hand on Sam’s leg just above the pocket where he’d put the knife.

“Lindsay, you have pretty hair. Is it real?” Sam was asking if the actual Lindsay looked anything like this or if she had created a sexy avatar through which she could live the virtual life of a prettier woman. He didn’t care one way or the other, but these were the flirty and inane conversations one had in Shadow World just to advance the time, to get to the next, better thing.

“Sam, it’s real,” she said. “Dyed, but real.” In his earpiece, he heard her giggle.

“Lindsay, Sam, bye,” Donna said. She already saw where this was going and moved down the bar to play with someone else.

“Lindsay, do you want to go for a walk?” Sam’s avatar asked.

“Sure!” Lindsay replied.

They walked outside and turned right on the sidewalk and had more ridiculous conversation of the real world rather than Shadow World kind. Sam turned down an alley and Lindsay followed. There was a car parked under a broken light, thirty or so feet from the street. Sam pressed Lindsay against it and started kissing her.

In Shadow World, players were constantly pairing off with strangers and having sex in public places. Countless magazine articles on the subject quoted psychologists who explained this was a common fantasy for both men and women, and it made sense that people would use the game to act it out in a world with no lasting consequences (venereal disease should have been more widespread in the game, but Shadow World public officials had taken the threat seriously and infection rates were only slightly higher than in the real world). If Shadow Sam spotted a woman alone in a bar, he could usually get her to an alley in even shorter time than this.

Shadow sex wasn’t the most visually stimulating thing. Programmers hadn’t yet mastered the code to make on-screen characters seem realistic or sexy. The naked icons appeared as textureless flesh-colored versions of their clothed selves, and the same visuals (her with mouth open, him with eyes closed, hips thrusting together in mechanical rhythm) looped and repeated again and again. Online sex was a big draw of the game, however, so the makers were working on a more explicit, adults-only plug-in for version 5.0.

Shadow World sex was similar to a dirty two-person (or sometimes three- or four- or seven-person) chat. As player icons mashed together on-screen, the players would shout and moan and call each other filthy names and describe how close they were to climaxing and what unexpected things they were going to do next to please their partners. Voyeurs, mostly kids whose parents had never bothered to activate parental controls, scanned the back streets at night looking to spy on illicit couplings like this one and record them to their hard drives. There were several Web sites devoted to the playback of amateur Shadow World pornos.

Unsuspecting Lindsay whispered many of the usual erotic clichés. When Sam reached into the puddle of pants around his ankles, she must have thought he was looking for a condom because she said, “Sam, do you want me to help you put it on?” As she spoke, the mouth of her avatar opened into a small black oval and collapsed into a flat red line like the mouth flap on an old Saturday morning cartoon. The subtleties of lip movement were still beyond Shadow World’s capabilities.

Sam’s avatar shook the towel from the blade and said, “Lindsay, no thanks,” and plunged the knife into her left side.

“Goddammit! Sonofabitch!” Lindsay yelped. They weren’t cries of fear or pain, but frustration and anger. Whatever riches or fame or happiness her character had amassed in Shadow World would be wiped out as the life bled from her avatar. She would have to start the game over as her own boring self again.

Shadow Lindsay collapsed backward onto the hood of the car. Sam picked up the towel and wrapped the knife in it and returned them to his pocket. He surveyed the alley to make sure he hadn’t left any clues and to make sure there wasn’t a punk voyeur hiding in the shadows. He walked back to Lincoln Avenue and found his car, and he drove east to Lake Shore Drive, past the pink building on his way home. He closed the door to his apartment quietly, washed the knife in the kitchen sink, and tiptoed into the bedroom. The woman was still asleep in his Shadow World bed just as the young art director was still in the actual one. The real Sam Coyne had never left his apartment.

The red message light on his screen had been flashing for an hour before it finally woke Justin from a vivid dream in which he was being chased by a cougar through the halls of his school. He rolled to the floor and thought for a moment that he would pull the blankets down on top of him and finish the night’s rest on the soft blue carpet, but when curiosity caught up with his consciousness, he knew he couldn’t go back to bed. He strained to see the clock on the desk. Four-thirty.

He trotted across the room on his hands and knees and lifted himself into his chair. The screen awoke and blinked into focus in a matter of seconds. As he suspected, he’d been sent a Shadow World news alert.

When news broke in Shadow World, it was reported in the Shadow media. For most people, this consisted of e-mailed news alerts, updating the player on matters of specific interest to his character. An alert might tell you that your favorite Shadow World singing group had scheduled a concert in your town, or that a work by your favorite Impressionist painter was going up for auction. Justin had subscribed to receive only a very specific type of news. If his e-mail light was flashing at four-thirty in the morning, someone in Shadow Chicago had been murdered.

In another Shadow World parallel, researchers observed that murders took place in the game at almost the same rate at which they occurred in the corresponding real cities. For Chicago, that meant over one per day. It was known that Shadow World thrill killing was a popular pastime for gamers, but no one seemed to understand why Shadow World murders, which were assumed to be perpetrated by different people and for different motives than their real counterparts, leveled out at the same rate.

Justin had asked to be notified only if the murderer hadn’t been apprehended at the scene and if the killing didn’t appear to be connected to a domestic dispute. That eliminated more than three quarters of them. At least once a week, however, Justin received a gruesome summary in his mailbox.

He scanned it quickly and it appeared to be a good candidate. He put on his headset and logged in to the game, and when his avatar materialized in his Shadow World bedroom, he started work. Shadow Justin dressed himself, snuck out the window, and jumped to the ground. He grabbed his electric bike from the garage and rode it to Shadow Northwood’s Metra stop. His inventory panel showed he had $40 in his pocket, a notebook, pen, camera, and Metra card, and he boarded the first train headed for downtown.

There weren’t many other players on the train at this hour. A tired-looking woman in a nursing uniform sat with her head resting against a window. A man in a suit, possibly a True-to-Lifer on an early commute, read the
Sun-Times
. A more casually dressed man sat in the first seat by the doors; Justin settled himself across the aisle and three seats up from him.

The train rumbled past dark houses and dark streets, the red lights of the crossings indicating when the train intersected a major road, and by counting them, Justin could determine the train’s location even without listening for the garbled announcements over the public-address system. After three stops the casual man approached and sat across the aisle from him. Justin turned and said hello. The man wore a yellow sweater with a collared shirt and glasses. He leaned forward and tried to speak, but the words in Justin’s headset were obscured by long beeps, and a text window above the man’s head printed the words <
AGE INAPPROPRIATE
>. Whatever he was saying, the parental controls disapproved. The man stood up and walked quickly out of the car, in case Justin planned to turn him in to the conductor.

After arriving at Northwestern station, Shadow Justin walked to the El and rode up to Lakeview. The news alert said the murder had taken place in the 2400 block of North Lincoln, and he ran to the address, triggering a mild on-screen energy warning to remind him that his avatar hadn’t eaten breakfast.

Three policemen stood on the sidewalk sharing a box of Krispy Kremes. Shadow World cops were almost all wannabes in real life and they spoke and acted in keeping with the worst television clichés. They ate a lot of doughnuts and talked about “running down perps.” Justin found them annoying.

“Kid, nothing to see here,” one of the cops said as Justin tried to duck under the yellow police tape. “Move along.”

“Officer, come on,” Justin said, trying to peek down an alley blocked by the blue-and-white police car. Justin took some photos, which were saved to his hard drive. An evidence technician, possibly computer-generated, was measuring distances from the body to various parts of the alley and making notes on a clipboard. A reporter scribbled in her notebook.

The cops had turned their backs to him, getting on with their non-cop-related conversation. Justin slipped a doughnut from the box, slid across the hood of the car, and ducked under the yellow police tape.

“Kid! Hey!” one of the cops yelled after him, but didn’t give chase. The reporter looked up from her work and took a few steps in their direction until Justin was behind her.

“Officers, it’s okay,” the Shadow reporter said. “He’s with me.” The cops waved. She and Justin walked on to the body.

The parental controls were efficient at blocking out swearwords and improper propositions and obscuring nudity and sexual activity on-screen, but they did nothing to protect child players from violence. If youthful gamers were immune to violence, the makers reasoned, they could never be killed or even injured, and that would compromise the integrity of the game. In their minds, it was necessary for Shadow World children to fall down wells and get caught beneath tractors and be chased by cougars if cougars escaped from the zoo. Few parents knew about this loophole. Martha Finn certainly didn’t.