Dark Realm, The (3 page)

T
am watched the new girl. Sure, it looked like he was taking notes while Ms. Lewis droned on about ancient civilizations, but under cover of his moving hand, under the hair he never bothered brushing out of his eyes, he was watching.

He always watched. Everything. Never said much, but that was okay. It kept him invisible and out of trouble.

So, the new girl. Jennet Carter. Everything about her screamed ‘elite.’ Elitist, too. She tucked a strand of pale hair behind one ear, and the chip implant in her wrist glinted. More proof that she didn’t belong here.

“Welcome to Crestview High,” Ms. Lewis said.

Jennet only nodded. She didn’t look too happy to be there, and for a moment, unwilling sympathy moved through him. Everyone was staring at her. It couldn’t be easy, coming into a new school after the year started - even if you were one of the privileged. Which, here in Crestview, made you a severe outsider.

She sat down and pulled a shiny new-model tablet out of her bag. Clearly the school ones weren’t good enough for her. Though, to be honest, some of those tablets barely worked. If he had the option, he’d bring his own gear, too.

She obviously lived in The View, the compound VirtuMax was building for their company employees. He’d heard the houses there were huge, that they were putting in specialty stores, a g-board park. Probably money falling off the bushes, too. All you needed to get in was a wrist-chip.

What would that be like? Wave your arm and have the gates of paradise open. Instant access to a safe and sanitary little world, full of the best tech money could buy. A fat credit account, probably kept full-up by a doting daddykins. Strings fully attached. He grimaced and rubbed his own wrist.

No thanks. Better to be under the radar, far as he was concerned. Not that the VirtuMax kids would know anything about being chewed up and spit out by the authorities. Even the regular townies thought they lived in the real world, but they were dreaming. Nothing was grittier and more real than the Exe. Even the locals tried to avoid his part of Crestview.

But despite his dislike of the new girl, he couldn’t stop sneaking looks. There was something about Jennet Carter. Something more than her long pale-gold hair and the high curve of her cheekbones. She seemed fragile. Mysterious.

He shook his head. The last thing Crestview High needed was another VirtuMax entitlement diva walking the halls.

At lunch, he and his friend Marny claimed a table near the back of the cafeteria. He’d known Marny for years - she lived on the outskirts of the Exe. But where he was lean and agile, she was easily as large as the big guys on the football team. Most kids avoided her, like being fat was a contagious disease. But she didn’t care.

Marny was who she was and the rest of the world could go blink. She was unapologetic to the point of rudeness, and he liked that, how actual she was. Plus, she noticed stuff. Not as much as him, but enough to make it worthwhile to hang with her. Sometimes. There were plenty of days he wanted to be alone, when he was all edges and sharpness. But not today.

“Look at her,” Marny said, pointing with her chin across the cafeteria. She made her eyes narrow and took a long, slurping drink of her cola, as if to show she wasn’t impressed.

“Who?”

He knew though. Jennet Carter was pretty hard to miss. He’d been aware of her from the moment she walked into the cafeteria. It was like an itch. Maybe if he ignored it, it would just go away. Uncomfortable, yeah, but scratching always made it worse. So he tried not to stare at Jennet’s sky-blue eyes, or notice the way she moved. Though now that Marny was pointing her out, he had to.

“That new girl, the rich bitch. She’s one of
them
.” Her voice was scornful, but he could hear the jealousy underneath.

Could taste it in his own mouth.

Them. The VirtuMax kids. They’d started showing up this summer, with their money and grav-cars and g-boards. Their privilege and arrogance. He pulled his battered brown coat tighter around his shoulders. He wanted nothing to do with them.

Marny took another gulp of her drink, then wadded up her napkin. “Are you done yet? Come on.” She grabbed her tray and stood.

“Where?” He looked down at his half-eaten lunch. It would be better if he finished it, since breakfast had been scarce and dinner was never a guarantee, but the grey meat and congealed white sauce was too unappealing. He pushed the tray away.

“The library. I have to see about graphics mods.”

“I guess.” He dumped his lunch and followed Marny out of the cafeteria.

The library smelled good. The scent of old paper filled up his nostrils, though there were fewer books every year. He went past the meager shelves and straight to the netscreens. Maybe he could find more info on the new simulators VirtuMax was working on.

The corporation had shouldered into town, but he could almost forgive them. After all, they were one of the few companies working on a full-sim.

Full sensory simulation. Total immersion in the virtual world.

His nerves tingled at the thought. What if that world - the world of pixels and programming - could feel as real as this one? Sometimes when he was simming he almost felt it, like he was
there
, inside the game. But the feeling never lasted. It was impossible to completely escape his reality.

He leaned back in his chair, one leg propped out in front of him. Maybe the people who said there couldn’t ever be a perfect interface were right, that the tech couldn’t ever get to the level of complexity that matched a human brain.

VirtuMax had been developing their full-sim for years, but the release was always delayed. Tam skimmed the articles, but he’d read all of them. The most recent one was a couple weeks old, about how the lead game developer’s death had brought the project to a stop.

Marny paused beside his screen, her taped-together reader glowing in her hand. “Anything interesting?”

“No. What are you looking up?”

She cocked a shoulder. “3-D meshes. I can’t get my avatar fat enough in Freelife. I don’t want to look like somebody’s idea of the perfect woman. I want to look like me.”

“Good luck with that. I hear Freelife’s a hard world to modify.”

“That’s why I chose it. Have you
seen
the avs in there?” She gave a snort of disgust. “If you saw someone who looked like that in RL, you’d think they were a genetically mutated freak. All legs and skinny and boobular.”

He hadn’t really noticed. In fact, he’d always been fine with the standard avatars in virtual reality. The females were usually cute and sexy. The guys were handsome and brawny, or fearsomely monstrous and warlike.

The point was, he
didn’t
want to be himself. All the options from there were good with him. Marny wanted to make a statement. She wanted to bust the parameters wide open. Him? He just wanted out.

“How’s your system?” she asked. “Still having issues?”

He shrugged. “It’s ok. I mean, it works. I can play, there’s just a weird thing with the imaging.”

And the sound card was going, and sometimes he lost connection altogether, but he didn’t want to say it out loud, in case it completely jinxed his system.

“That’s the problem with over-clocked gear.” Marny shook her head. “You’d think it would last more than a year, huh. My uncle Zeg might have some spare parts around. Or you could go back to playing at his simcafe.”

Back to the rental-quality systems. The thought left a sour taste in his mouth. For years he’d helped around the cafe in exchange for system time. Marny’s uncle didn’t mind the extra help - or the way people would come in to watch Tam play, after he got good.

Good enough that he won last year’s tri-state simming tournament. He’d scored his system out of it - plus a chance to compete at nationals. And he could have won there, too, if only…

His heart twisted at the memory and he yanked himself back to the present - away from the poisonous thoughts of what might have been.

“Ok,” he said to Marny. “If your uncle has some parts, that could work. I might end up needing them.”

He didn’t even want to think about his system failing. The best part of his day was when he could pull on the helmet, slip on the gloves, and go slay some monsters. Be a hero for a little while, someplace where he was the best.

“Why don’t you ask him,” Marny said, direct as usual.

“Fine then, I will.”

Maybe Zeg had something worth scavenging. Tam’s little brother could figure out how to wire it in - the only thing the Bug was really good at. His blood-stabilizing meds made the kid so manic he couldn’t concentrate on anything unless it was full of fire or electricity.

Tam shook his head and went back to reading. There were no solutions.

Sometimes he was pretty sure his life was on its way to being permanently broken.

CHAPTE
R THREE

“H
ow’s school going, Jennet?” Dad asked after dinner on Thursday. “It can’t be much like prep. Are you sure you made the right choice?”

She’d made the only choice. “It’s fine, Dad.”

If by
fine
you meant bleak.

Whatever the Dark Queen had done to her, it was severe - and getting worse. Every morning, a paler version of Jennet stared out of the mirror. Dizziness swirled around her when she stood up or walked too quickly. She could hide the hollow shakiness filling her up, but eventually Dad would notice she was sick again, the way she’d been right after she lost the battle with the queen. The doctors had no clue. They’d called it ‘summer pneumonia’ and had kept her in the hospital ten days. But this time, she didn’t think hospital meds would help.

Her time was running out.

Dad leaned forward and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Are you meeting people? I know it’s not an easy transition, but by next summer there should be a lot more families here in the View.”

If she made it to next summer. “I’ve met a couple of the company kids. They seem nice.” And tragic, as far as gaming went.

The dark-haired girl shared a lot of her classes, but she was all anti-tech - in full rebellion against the company both her parents worked for. And from Jennet’s few conversations with the other Viewer, he didn’t seem to be much of a gamer. He claimed to like simming, but he had no idea about any of the new games or systems.

“Glad to hear it.” Dad smiled at her, though there was worry in his eyes. “The academics here can’t be that challenging for you. Going back to your old school as a boarder is still an option. I wish you’d consider it.”

Panic stabbed through her and she shook her head. They had been over this so many times. Wherever the Full-D system was, she had to be. The only way to save herself was to get back to the Dark Court - she knew it in her bones.

The only problem was, she couldn’t get there.

She’d tried, over and over, had spent frustrating hours in-game, trying to get past the first level. No matter what she did - rolling new characters, trying all the quest lines - she couldn’t get to the Dark Court. Couldn’t even get past the starting areas. At least, not by herself. Just as the queen had decreed - she was barred from Feyland.

“A review of the academic subjects isn’t going to hurt me, Dad. I’m staying here, with you. Not changing my mind about that.”

She’d tried telling him what had happened. But every time, the words dried up in her mouth. How could she explain? It was pretty unbelievable. If it weren’t for the fact that she
felt
what the game was doing to her, she wouldn’t believe it herself. And she didn’t think he’d listen to her argue about why she should be allowed to play again on the Full-D. He’d just see it as gamer excuses. The system was currently off-limits to her - which just made everything more complicated.

Two years ago, Dad had used his program-manager privilege and brought a version of the new Full-D system home. Always working, that was Dad, but in this case it had been fun for her, too. He’d let her try out the early versions of the games the company was developing. When the next-gen system came out, he’d scored one of those, too, arguing that his daughter was a great tester. It was true.

At first she and Dad had run the proto-sims together. He was a terrible player, but he’d watch how she did things in-game and take the information back to the game designers, the rest of his team. She even played an early version of Feyland, though it was nothing like the world she’d become lost in.

Then Dad’s work heated up. His old college friend, Thomas Rimer, joined the company as lead game developer. That had been fun - Thomas was like an uncle to her, and always brought her interesting things to read. Old books, rare ones unavailable in e-format, full of fantastical creatures and odd stories. It was obvious, reading them, where his ideas for Feyland had come from.

Dad had gotten even busier with work and she spent more time by herself on the Full-D, playing through the same old content. Until she’d found the password-protected files. Dad’s security was always easy to crack, and she was curious to see what his development team was working on.

What she had found was magic.

Golden light surrounded her, and she was transported to another world. She walked through a meadow of flowers and felt the breeze against her face, smelled the fresh scent of grasses and earth. Pixies fluttered around her, laughing. Odd creatures gave her quests that led to unexpected puzzles. Her first fight in-game had been ferocious - magebolts sizzled from her magical staff and she had slain a black wyvern, receiving a glowing treasure in return.