Slum Online (10 page)

The characters’ polygonal bodies moved with extreme fidelity. When they punched, they extended their arms and drew them back. When they kicked, the same was true of their legs. A hit that landed as a character was drawing in his arms or legs was considered a counter. Counters sent characters flying high into the air. Dealing massive damage to a character soaring helplessly across the screen was one of the core strategies of the game.

Given split-second timing, people don’t have the luxury to think over what they’re going to do. Our bodies react on their own with the action they’re most familiar with. A conditioned reflex. To hone those reflexes, martial artists practice thousands of strikes a day, astronauts run through the same simulations over and over, and I practice my combos on the training dummy. There is no element of chance when you’re up against other players in a virtual world. A good player only wins as often as he deserves to win. I had proven that at the arcade in Shinjuku.

As soon as Tetsuo stood, he dashed forward to close the gap between himself and Ricky. Ricky backed off and to the right.

Tetsuo threw a middle punch. Ricky blocked. I canceled the kick I’d buffered after the punch and made a low kick instead. Ricky back dashed. I jumped and threw a middle punch from the air, immediately followed by a high spin kick. Ricky avoided both attacks with a crouching back dash. Tetsuo canceled out of the spin kick. This wasn’t getting him anywhere.

Tetsuo was waiting for Ricky’s next crouching back dash. Timed right, he should be able to land a counterattack. Tetsuo rushed forward, sticking his knee out in Ricky’s path.

Only, Ricky wasn’t there. Tetsuo’s knee sliced through thin air. Impossible. As Ricky spun to the left, his knee struck Tetsuo. The counterhit sound FX played.

Once more, Tetsuo’s body rose into the air. Ricky punched, canceled, and punched again. Tetsuo went crashing into, then bouncing off, the polygonal barrel. Ricky caught him with an open-palmed thrust as he rebounded off the barrel. Ricky dashed forward, canceled, punched, and punched again. A spinning roundhouse kick provided the coup de grace.

Tetsuo’s lifeless body collapsed across the barrel, jittering as it grated slowly to the ground. A gray web spread across the screen. One final bubble of text flickered over Ricky’s head.

> Yup. Bacon.

The system booted Tetsuo offline.

The screen changed to a uniform shade of blue. A tiny message swam in the center of the screen.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO LOG BACK IN?

I slammed the controller onto the floor. A dull pain rose in my thumb; I’d hit the floor hard enough to split my thumbnail. Blood black as ink welled up from beneath the nail.

I sucked on my wounded thumb. A bitter, metallic taste filled my mouth.

Tonight’s score: 0 wins, 1 loss.

CHAPTER 6

A TEPID MIASMA HUNG OVER THE CAMPUS during the rainy season. The weather seemed permanently stuck in an obscene limbo between blistering heat and pouring rain. The humidity in the air made it an effort to breathe. Shinjuku felt like a giant steam cooker. The flame beneath the pot had just been lit, and it would only get worse from here.

Fumiko Nagihara and I were in the same year and in the same department, so naturally we had the same required courses. Whenever I attended any given class, there was approximately a 70 percent chance she would be there. Fumiko was on campus every day except Sunday.

Fumiko hated it when anyone used her last name. She said she didn’t like the way it sounded. She had an aversion to the usual nicknames too. I think her girlfriends called her Fumi, or Fumi-chan, but I wasn’t about to go there. Instead, I played it safe by addressing her by name as little as humanly possible.

I’d made it to class the last Thursday, Friday, and even Saturday. Fumiko complained about the rain. Apparently the front had stalled right over the city. My surge in attendance left me with more cards than I knew what to do with. I understood why the students who showed up for every class didn’t bother collecting cards. They’d end up with enough to build a deck.

Somehow we’d reached an unspoken agreement that we would sit together in the seats along the wall seven rows from the front of the classroom. Fumiko didn’t like it when I had my headphones on, so I did my best to listen to the lecture instead.

The sound FX of a desk squeaking on the floor. The sound FX of Fumiko breathing. The sound FX of the air passing through my windpipe. A wealth of discordant sounds always filled the classrooms.

Fumiko turned to me when class ended.

“Why don’t you ever talk about your family?”

“There’s nothing to say.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“I’ve heard people have more intimate conversations when they’re talking to someone they look up to.” She stared at me meaningfully. “With everyone else, their conversations are just filler. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work for girls.”

My family was an ordinary family. There must have been thousands of families just like ours scattered across Japan. I didn’t have any complaints about my parents, and as far as I knew, they didn’t have any about me. If I took another half step into the virtual world, I risked being pulled in the way my friend who’d vanished into the northern wastes had. But so far, I’d managed to keep my feet planted firmly in RL, albeit on the borders. There just wasn’t all that much about RL that I felt needed discussing.

Fumiko forged ahead. “What are you interested in? What are your hobbies?”

“Games.”

“But you don’t go to arcades, I know that. You have a PlayStation or something?”

The PlayStation wasn’t exactly cutting-edge technology anymore, but explaining that to Fumiko would have been more trouble than it was worth.

“That’s right.”

“Anything else?”

“Nope.”

Clearly Fumiko wasn’t satisfied. “What about that?” She pointed.

“It’s a dried flower.”

“So that’s another hobby of yours?”

“Yeah, I guess. I like to read, watch movies…You know, the usual.” To me, a hobby was something you only had one of, but I didn’t feel like explaining that either.

“I don’t think I’d call those hobbies.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Aren’t those things all boys do as kids?”

“Sure, but there’s nothing saying you have to stop when you grow up. Didn’t the president of Hudson Soft have a miniature train running through his R&D division?”

“That’s not a fact I would use to form the cornerstone of an argument,” she said.

“Probably not.”

Fumiko sighed.

There was no denying that games were entertainment. What set this particular form of entertainment apart from all the others that had come before was a very smart black box called a computer. Games were a doorway that let players step into a make-believe world with its own set of rules. Computers ruled over these imaginary lands as enlightened despots applying the rules with total impartiality and unflagging faithfulness. I think that sense of a protected environment was part of what drew us to games in the first place.

“Are you bored with school?” she asked.

“What makes you think I’m bored?”

“Why else would you ride trains all the way to Shinjuku and never show up for class?” She paused for emphasis. “And you aren’t in any clubs, either.”

I considered for a moment. I’d thought a lot of things about school, but boring wasn’t one of them. “I think it must be the noise.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The wind. The cars. Doors closing. Dogs barking. People.”

“You’re a poet.”

“No. No, really. I’m not.” Fumiko tilted her head at me. A tiny ear peeked out from beneath her short jet-black bob. The fluorescent lights tinted the moss green of her jacket a vivid hue.

“Every place has its own rhythm,” I said.

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to understand.”

“Is that so?”

“Maybe I should ask you why you always come to class instead.”

“Do I need a reason?”

“I do.”

She placed a finger against her lips. “I can’t really say. Both of my brothers graduated from college, so I guess I thought I should too. As long as I’m here, I might as well study.”

“Hmph.”

“You’re laughing at me.”

“No I’m not,” I said.

“You think it’s stupid to go to all your classes?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then why’d you laugh? And don’t tell me that wasn’t a laugh. I know what I heard.” On some level Fumiko was clearly enjoying this.

The sounds of the classroom felt distant to me, the way they always did. Someone sat in one of the seats behind us. The buttons on his jacket made rattling sound FX as they brushed against the desk.

“Where do you ride?” I blurted.

The question came out of nowhere, surprising even me.

“Ride what?”

“The train.”

“You mean which car?”

“No, inside the car.”

Fumiko’s brow wrinkled in thought. “If there’s an open seat, I take it. Middle seat, end seat—doesn’t matter. The seats are always heated in the winter. I like that. Do I need a reason for that too?”

“Not really.”

Fumiko had graduated from a private high school. Her father was a banker. She was straitlaced and meticulous, the sort of girl who read back over her own notes to highlight the really important parts in yellow. An honor student who never missed a class. She could walk on the sacred ground of the salarymen and sit in their precious RL seats without arousing even a murmur of protest.

“I’m not the only one here with weird hobbies,” I said with a grin.

“Huh?”

“Cat hunting. Or have you given up on that?”

She averted her eyes. “I’m still looking.”

“Alone?” I asked. She nodded but said nothing. “Why?”

“Maybe I should quit.”

“You don’t want to tell me the reason?”

“There is no reason. If it’s a hobby, then I don’t need one, do I?” She wasn’t looking for an answer. She’d made up her mind.

“Okay.”

“Will you help me look?”

The two of us were even. All debts paid. Searching the city for a dubious cat from an urban legend wasn’t the sort of thing college students were meant to spend their time doing. And my own virtual search for Ganker Jack had encountered problems of its own.

Despite all that, the thought of Fumiko walking alone at night through Kabuki-chō didn’t sit well with me. It was like watching a newborn kitten play along the edge of a busy street. I wanted to tell her I’d rather do something—anything—else. But I didn’t.

One of my classmates in elementary school was convinced that aliens were visiting Earth. I think he must have gotten the notion from some tabloid-style documentary he saw on television. None of us took it very seriously, but he had fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. He’d always been gullible that way.

For a precocious kid who knew he had a 100 percent chance to win if he used paper but had the balls to go fifty-fifty with scissors to keep the game fair, it was obvious that the show was just some grown-up’s idea of entertainment. I didn’t believe in aliens for a minute. But I still remember how painful it was watching the poor guy searching so earnestly for the aliens the rest of us knew he’d never find.

Compared to that, a blue cat that made dreams come true was a mystery I could live with. It didn’t hurt anyone, and if it kept a couple of college students with too much time on their hands entertained, then why not? It was probably just like the bat lady said: some drunk bought paint at a hardware store, applied it to an unfortunate stray, and
voilà
, instant magic cat.

I couldn’t say much about the dreams coming true bit, but there were stranger things than finding a blue cat in Shinjuku. As adventures went, it was probably less indicative of a deepseated mental disorder than, say, searching the streets of a virtual world trying to hunt down a mystery assassin probably controlled by some kid from who-knows-where.