Cristal - Novella (4 page)

Why did he sound so familiar? Who was
this person?
She opened the door into the darkness of the room.
Her hand reached out for the light switch, an automatic reaction.
He grabbed her hand and held it tight.

“Keep the lights down for now.”

The streaks of pale moonlight streamed
through the open window onto her bed.

Serena tried to think. She could have easily
caught her captor by surprise and kneed him in the groin or better
yet, gouged his eyes out if she wanted to. Having taught
self-defense classes at Global Nation for the past two years, she
was not about to lose her advantage of her hidden talent until she
ascertained what kind of weapon he carried.

“Have a seat on the bed.”

Unsure of what his intentions were and yet
as equally curious, she sat down on the corner of her bed, obeying
his request. Her gaze moved up his dark pants and up his jacket
until it reached his face. He raised his arm. She held her breath
anticipating a blow, but realized he was only removing his hoodie
from his head.

Before she could react, he sat down beside
her and removed the backpack from his shoulder and lowered it onto
the bed, keeping it close to him. He fumbled for a minute and
brought out a square object. He placed it onto his lap and then
opened it. The bright light from the laptop caught her by surprise
and forced her to rule out robbery, rape, or kidnapping as a
motive. He had to be the lamest intruder on the planet.

Unable to contain herself, she jumped up and
said in a loud voice, “What is this? Who the hell are you?”

He turned to her, his blue eyes piercing
into hers. His lips curled into a smile, like a child who had a
secret to share.

“Harry…Harry Doubt. Nice to finally meet you
in person, Serena, or should I say, Lioness? I have a mission for
you. Many Philippine citizens have ‘disappeared’ or have gone
missing in the last year.”

“Are you nuts?” Serena sputtered. “You don’t
break into peoples’ houses and say, ‘Hi, I have a mission for you.’
I want you to leave.”

Serena stood, pointing at the door.

“Perhaps I went about this the wrong way,”
Harry said with a sigh.

“Ya’ think?”

Harry reached out to shake her hand in an
attempt to introduce himself. Serena grabbed it and made a swift
classic “
ippon seoinage
” judo move, disabling Harry with a
one-arm shoulder throw to the ground. She pinned her foot over his
throat and twisted his arm.
That teaches you a lesson.

“So talk to me. What’s this about?” she
asked.

“Manila, Global Nation,” Harry managed to
choke out. “Disappearances.”

“So? Tell me something I don’t know. Global
Nation has been offering help to the local police and army to
investigate the disappearances.”

She pushed her foot even more firmly on his
throat.

“In my front pocket of my shirt, there’s a
flash card. Take it.”

She reached for the flash card while keeping
an eye on him.

“We need you to find out what is on your
father’s computer. We have information that GN is involved.”

Mist:
Zero, are you there? Hello?

Zero:
Yes. We’re confirmed for video
chat with Onyx at 1 pm. Do I need to remind you to be nice?

Be nice?
Cristal stared blankly at
the screen.

Mist:
Of course I’ll be nice.
Who do you
think I am?

Before she could respond further, he logged off.
Argh!

When Harry recruited Kerim Ilgaz without
asking Cristal, she was “nice.” She had voiced her concerns about
Kerim’s technical skills that were not up to par with the others on
the Elite team.

“There are other talents we need, not just
programming or gaming ones,” he said.

Harry didn’t share what those talents were,
so she respectfully kept her mouth shut.

And wasn’t she
nice
when Harry
recruited Angelica? Again, despite her not even being in the top
500 of the Truth Seekers’ game, she agreed to train her.

“She will be a significant asset for us when
we need it,” he assured her.

Serena, on the other hand, was really cool
to work with. Stationed in the Philippines, which was twelve hours
ahead of New York time, Serena often video chatted with her late at
night or early in the morning, all without complaint. She took the
missions seriously just as she did.

But what was the big deal with Joanna?
During the online game missions, Joanna always broke the rules. She
once led the team into enemy territory with not enough weapons or
ammunition despite Cristal’s warnings. They did succeed in
destroying the enemy’s munitions building, but to the expense of
losing three members of their team. Nothing Harry could say would
convince her that Joanna was nothing more than a ladder-climbing
fraud.

She took a deep breath.
Don’t worry, Mr.
Doubt, I will deal with Joanna when the time comes.

***

Ten years ago, Cristal Hernandez started
playing the online game, Truth Seekers. In her real life outside
the game, she didn’t fit in with anything or anybody. Classmates
called her “the loner” or “weirdo,” taunting her in the playground
because she was always nose deep in a book.

She enjoyed losing herself in the fantasy
world where the problems of her life didn’t matter. Since she was
little, she was very aware of things that made her different from
other children. Her father used to spend time with her, teaching
her how to control her “abilities.” She was able to open a book and
read it from beginning to end in half an hour. The words used to
lift off the page and flood into her head in waves of sentences,
phrases, and paragraphs. She used to tell her father that it felt
as if she was consuming a book, not reading it.

When she was in first grade, her father
began molding her interest in computer programming. Instead of
dolls or toys to play with, she received thick programming books to
read. He told her that these skills would be very useful for her in
the future. She enjoyed consuming the books and found the
programming activities inside them creatively challenging. Soon,
she was building online applications and web tools. The power of
creating something out of physically nothing tantalized her
curiosity.

“Dad, I want to do more projects. What else
can you teach me?” she begged him.

“You were meant to do special things,
Cristal,” he always told her.

When she was with him, she felt she could
accomplish anything she wanted. But one day, everything
changed.

On her tenth birthday, her father never made
it home from work. He was reported officially missing after her
mother placed a missing person report forty-eight hours later.

“He can’t be gone, Mom! He just can’t!”

She ran into her room and slammed the door.
She remembered how at that same moment, her heart began racing, her
lungs were expanding as if drawing in all the air around her, and
the room slowly started spinning. The floor shifted beneath her
feet and then the walls started to shake.

“
Cristal! Stop!”

“Dad?”

She whirled around. There was no one in the
room but her. Her heart rate slowed; the room was no longer
shaking. Her books were strewn on the floor, evidence that the
event happened. Had her father not called out to her, who knows
what damage she could have done?

After that night, she was convinced that her
father would return.

When the police closed the missing person’s
file a year later, her mother became ghost-like—floating around the
house, wordless; an empty vessel.

Cristal had no choice but to fend for both
of them. She knew that’s what her father would have wanted. She
made sure her mom made it to her psychiatric appointments and her
Help Group at the local church. She learned how to buy the
groceries and cook. All the while, she never gave up the hope of
seeing her father again. Even if she had wanted to forget, her
dreams wouldn’t let her.

Her father is standing at a distance, surrounded by
a light mist, waving and calling out her name. She runs towards
him, screaming, “Dad, I’m coming to you!” but her voice has no
sound. The faster she runs, the farther he seems to be. Still, she
runs faster, harder. Clouds of white merciless mist block her from
reaching him. “Dad, don’t go!” she cries out in her head. But now,
his image is fading, melting into the blanket of whiteness and
silence.

Two years after her father’s disappearance, her
mother started dating a dentist from her Help Group. Short, bald
with a terrible case of bad breath, he was the complete opposite of
her father. It wasn’t long before
Dr. Halitosis
married her
mom and moved into their home.

“Cristal, get off the computer. You have
school tomorrow,” her mother called out from the living room.

“Mom, fifteen more minutes!”

Fifteen minutes usually meant an hour.

“You know how your dad hates you playing
those online games. He’s going to be home soon.”

“He’s not my dad,” she grumbled under her
breath.
Why does Mom put up with that creep?

Instead of hanging out at the malls like
most thirteen-year-old girls, she spent her spare time battling
against evil. It was about the time when she received a full
scholarship to study at MIT, the summer before her fifteenth
birthday, when she first met Harry.

She had gained ten million points, the most
any player had ever reached. Everyone was talking about it in the
discussion forums. That same day, she received a private message,
which invited her to join the Elite team. It was sent by Harry, or
more accurately by his online alias
Zero Doubt
, creator of
the Truth Seekers. All gamers knew that
Zero
only invited
the best of the best.

Zero:
Inviting you to be a member of
the Elite Team. You have twenty-four hours to accept the
invitation.

No one would even dream of receiving a private
message from the infamous
Zero Doubt
. Other gamers could
only hope of having
Zero
comment on their discussion posts.
When Harry posted a message, gamers would rush to reply to his post
in hopes that he would respond.
What a bunch of losers. Who the
heck was this Zero Doubt anyway
?

But the challenge to be in the top team was
hard to resist. So she responded to his invitation.

Mist:
Mission accepted. Awaiting
further instructions.

After the first successful mission as an
elite Truth Seeker, Harry began messaging her regularly. They
started to spend hours online brainstorming strategic maneuvers to
conquer other players in the game.

Many times while video chatting with Harry,
her stepfather would bang on her door yelling, “If you don’t stop
playing on the computer, I’m going to shut off the Internet!”

“Is everything okay?” Harry would ask
her.

“Yeah,” she answered, in a tone that was a
bit sharper than she intended.

She always pretended that things were fine.
“Never show anyone your weaknesses,” her father always told her.
“Especially your closest allies
.”

“IS HE SERIOUS?” Joanna asked herself,
running her hand through her long, straight, black hair. This was
the fourth quality assurance project assigned to her. What an
insult to her programming expertise. She wasn’t the top gamer in
Truth Seekers for nothing.

She drummed her peach-colored manicured
nails on the armrest of her office chair.

Instead of working, she was entertaining
herself by playing the Truth Seekers’ alternate reality game. The
fun part was doing it with no one noticing. It wasn’t hard to do,
since she was the newest kid on the block. Her cubicle was the size
of a postage stamp stuck way back in the dungeons of the office,
far away into the corner next to the archive cabinets. The nearest
cubicle to her was ten feet away, so she had all the privacy she
needed to play her games. Out of all the games she played, Truth
Seekers was the most breathless and demanding, just like the
programmer genius who developed it. And like in any game, she
wanted the top prize, so she had no doubt that Harry was hers to
attain.

The game’s private message box bounced in
the corner of the monitor demanding her attention.

Joanna’s eyes sparked with excitement.

Zero:
Onyx, let’s meet at the coffee
shop across the street in ten minutes. Mist hacked into the
database and found some information that might help both Graphix
and you find out what happened in the disappearance of your
family members. You can work to decode all the encrypted data. But
we can talk more when we see each other.

Without hesitation, Joanna logged out of her
computer, grabbed her purse and ran out the back door. She ran
across the street, the spiked heels of her black boots tapping the
cement. She could see Harry sitting by the window table of the
coffee shop. Finally, here was her chance to work alone with Harry
on a real Truth Seekers’ mission.

Harry Doubt, the icon of alternate reality
game creators was a private guy. Gamers could only play by his
personal invitation. Joanna, who had been playing obsessively on
Truth Seekers every night, took the job at Global Nation at the GN
University campus in New York City when Harry sent out the
following message via the Truth Seekers’ private message
system:

“Looking for a real Truth Seekers’ mission?
Only inviting 5 of the top gamers here. You’ll get to work closely
with me on missions which are yet to be disclosed.”

Joanna didn’t think
twice. She was twenty-four years old and had just graduated from
the Emery College’s Game Art and Design Program in San José,
California. She was itching to do something fun. She bought a
one-way ticket to New York City.