Slum Online (26 page)

I looked up the thrush we had seen—a dusky thrush, apparently—and determined it was indeed a diff erent bird from a sparrow. According to Wikipedia, the dusky thrush rarely sings. A private bird, it preferred to lurk in the shade of the undergrowth. I could identify with that.

I don’t know how far separated Etsuro and Tetsuo were in Etsuro’s mind, but in my own mind there was a clear division between Hashimoto the character and me the player. It was Hashimoto who heard Tetsuo’s request, Hashimoto who was doing Tetsuo a favor. It had nothing to do with either me or Etsuro Sakagami. That was the theory, but putting it into practice was another matter. Everything about my current task felt onerous. I couldn’t think clearly and oft en wished the whole thing would just melt away like an ice sculpture set outside on a summer day. How much easier that would be.

I opened a door to a house of stacked polygons, went in for a look around, and then moved on to the next. There was no indication of night or day in my room. The cardboard strip on the shutters was firmly in place, and the clock still sat silent, its batteries removed. The cola I’d taken from the fridge the night before had gone from winter cold to the lingering chill of an autumn day. On screen, the Versus Town sky was the same turquoise blue it always was.

I was on my twentieth or thirtieth house when I saw a face through one of the semi-translucent windows—someone standing on the road outside. If my memory served, it looked exactly like Ganker Jack.

Jack?
He shouldn’t be here anymore. The man had practically been looking for someone to bury him. Why would he ever come back? Had he heard about Tetsuo’s slow withdrawal from the game? Or maybe Jack’s player had stolen the trophy. If that were the case, I would have to rebuild my entire set of working assumptions.

My head moved sluggishly, but my fingers launched into precise action. Hashimoto dashed forward, leaping over a sofa, kicked open the door, and ran in the direction of the mysterious character.

Jack was a middleweight, Hashimoto a lightweight. I would have no trouble catching up. I had my laptop open and had been intending to check some data, but there was no time for that now. The slightest blink of delay in entering a command could decide everything. Luckily, I knew this place better than the back of my hand. As long as I didn’t get into any fights, nothing could slow me down.

As I ran, Hashimoto leveraged a small jump onto a hedgerow into a large jump. I looked around in midair and found the person I was looking for. It was Jack’s face, all right. But the body was wrong—it looked like the girl from that late-night anime everyone seemed to be copying lately.

My mark ducked into an alley. I mashed some commands and sent Hashimoto in aft er him. There he was. I stopped Hashimoto about three and a half steps away—just out of dash-throw range.

> Who are you?

Without answering, my mark lifted his girlish arms and removed the mask, which should have been impossible. Masks in
Versus Town
weren’t placed on the face, they were directly applied to facial textures. If there had been a patch to change this, I hadn’t heard anything about it.

My surprise at that was nothing compared to what I saw next. I was looking at myself—Hashimoto, to be precise. My mark wore the face of a grumpy old man on the body of an anime girl.

> I will ask you again. Who are you?

A speech bubble appeared above the mystery figure’s head, his diction mimicking my own antiquated style.

> Before I may respond to your request, I have a question of mine own. I want to hear your thoughts on the meaning of our existence here in Versus Town.

Was he serious or merely having a laugh at my expense? I had no way to tell. What seemed clear was that he had looked into the window of the house with the express purpose of drawing me out. I was the mark, not him. There was nothing to lose and everything to gain by taking this matter very seriously indeed. Leaving my controller where I could grab it at a moment’s notice, I began to type.

> While performing a hundred push-ups might make one’s arms strong, vaulting an E-rank wall one hundred times does not make one any stronger. All that we can advance is our sense of arcane command timings, all of which could change with the next patch. In other words, all characters in
Versus
Town
stand upon the deck of a ship that might capsize at any moment.

> Not what I would have expected to hear from Hashimoto’s player. Why, your assessment of
VT
is practically the same as that of the sneering old man who dismisses all this as a “virtual” waste of time.

The impostor Hashimoto looked as unimpressed as an impassive mask of polygons could look.

> Then what would you say we are?

> Focusing prisms. The online environment possesses the capacity to augment one or more parts of a player’s personality. The imaginary character we create online is a delusion or fantasy, if you prefer, above and beyond the fantasies we carry around with us in RL.

> We’re just fantasies, then?

> We cling to fantasies in both the real and virtual. What I wish to point out is that those fantasies are different.

What this Hashimoto was saying was perfectly in character for Hashimoto. I felt almost like he’d stolen Hashimoto away from me, leaving me, the player, standing naked in an alley in Versus Town. Not a pleasant sensation.

> So what are you trying to

I began to type, but the other Hashimoto cut me off with a stream of text in his own speech bubble.

> The real Etsuro Sakagami would never turn to Jun Yamanouchi for help unraveling a mystery. Why? Because the real Jun Yamanouchi doesn’t match the RL image of someone capable of unraveling mysteries—he doesn’t fit the fantasy. Not so with the imaginary online character Hashimoto. He might be capable where Jun Yamanouchi is not. At least, that’s what Etsuro Sakagami thinks. He entrusts Hashimoto with a task he would never entrust to his player.

> Yes, but Hashimoto is merely a part of Jun Yamanouchi, a character whom I role-play, nothing more. How could Hashimoto divine anything I could not?

He spoke again.

> Of course the intellectual limitations of the player are those of the character. My brain and yours are the same, after all. Yet I, who possess augmented capacity for thought in a certain direction, have abandoned whole categories of things that you do, allowing you to choose from certain paths of action that you have already discarded because you did not require them.

That is how I am able to arrive at conclusions well outside Jun Yamanouchi’s usual framework of thought.

Apparently, the Hashimoto I was talking to was the real Hashimoto. He was making me feel like an impostor.

> Sounds like you already know the answer then.

> Of course I do. It’s quite simple.

> Easy for me to say.

> It’s not only a question of virtual theory. If you are able to leverage this new personality you have found within yourself, to accept it as part of your total being, then you can bring it back to serve the needs of Jun Yamanouchi in RL.

> Sounds complicated.

> I never said it would be easy.

Hashimoto deft ly shrugged the polygons in his shoulders— one of my favorite emotes.

Back when all Sanchōme had been abuzz with talk of the ganker, Tetsuo hadn’t been the only one hot on Jack’s trail. There were plenty of guys out there looking to bring Jack down and make a name for themselves in the process, Hashimoto being one of them. But though I had been chasing Jack, I never wanted to defeat him. I couldn’t claim the online miracle that was Jack all for myself. I wasn’t so arrogant as to deprive all those people chasing aft er a fantasy of their one chance of justifying hours spent idly wandering the streets of Sanchōme just to satisfy my own sense of purpose.

Nor was there any guarantee that Hashimoto could have taken Jack down even had he gone that route. Rather, it was highly unlikely. That it seemed likely now was an illusion brought about because Tetsuo had defeated him and taken the title of reigning champion for his own. If I rewound my memory to the time before Tetsuo’s victory, I found Jack standing like a monument over Versus Town: undefeatable, superhuman. For Tetsuo’s player, Etsuro Sakagami, the decision to take on Jack couldn’t have been an easy one. But he had chosen it and had made it across the tightrope to victory.

It had been an unusual situation, to say the least. They had decided to fight without an audience at all. That had been what Tetsuo wanted, of course. Jack as well, no doubt. Hashimoto himself understood the justice in it, and Pak hadn’t seemed to mind either. But it must have been a particularly bitter ending—having been stuck lurking out of the spotlight—for whoever sent the trophy to Etsuro. That was why he was trying to reboot Jack’s story now.

Hashimoto could simply walk away, and this second chapter in Jack’s story would likely find its own ending, somewhere in between
VT
and RL.
But would it be an ending I wanted?
No
—
it doesn’t matter what
I
think.
Hashimoto, this imaginary character I had created, was me, but at the same time, not exactly “me.” Hashimoto lacked some parts of my personality, while possessing others in even greater abundance than I did—probably a mixed blessing for him. For me, I had a little more flexibility. It all came down to whom I chose to favor at any given time: myself or Hashimoto.

I realized that it wasn’t about whether I wanted a reboot of Jack’s story. The question I really should be asking was, “Would Hashimoto want this new ending?” I could probably get through this as a bystander. That would be more my style anyway—to stand back, out of the action—especially now that I knew Tetsuo’s player was my old friend. Yet the memory of my joy at having been, as Hashimoto, even a spectator at the miracle that was Ganker Jack and the frenzy that erupted around him pulled me irresistibly into the thick of it. I could not ignore that memory. To do so would be to allow RL to overwrite Hashimoto.

But would that be such a great loss? No matter how well I played the role of Hashimoto, I didn’t really expect his character to rub off on me in any appreciable way. The potential for personal growth online was a fleeting thing, a little dream quickly lost in a deluge of data. Trying to catch it was akin to catching a silvery fish bare-handed.

Yet that hope for personal growth fueled my role-playing of Hashimoto. I had to conclude that it was vital to prevent RL considerations from destroying online potential, no matter how small that potential. The one who had stolen the trophy didn’t understand this, and I couldn’t abide that. It wasn’t a question of who had been inconvenienced or who was helping whom. This was a personal aff ront to Hashimoto and every other resident of Versus Town. In a place where action was king, taking action
sans
understanding was the worst thing you could possibly do.

It fell to me to bury this second chapter before it even got started, and as Hashimoto I was uniquely qualified to do that. As a bystander, he had watched as Tetsuo pursued Jack. I was now quite sure that the trophy thief had also been one of Jack’s pursuers. It would be a simple thing to simulate the thought patterns of someone who hadn’t been happy to see things go the way they had.

I realized I’d been staring at my twenty-four-inch flat-screen monitor for some time without looking at anything in particular. The AFK chime in the game began to sound. In
Versus Town
, that warning only went off aft er several minutes of inactivity. I checked the time on my laptop and saw it was already ten
PM
in RL. I’d been dreaming.

Had I really been chatting with someone? Had I been playing while I was asleep? It was possible that Jack’s player had really shown up looking and acting like Hashimoto, and as long as he was acting like Hashimoto he would be Hashimoto. But why would Jack have any reason to go so far out of his way on my account? No, I must have been dreaming.

Real or not, the episode had left me with a new insight on the case. I now knew who the trophy thief was. Once I understood how he felt, it hadn’t been hard. In fact, I realized the problem had never been the thief ’s identity. The real problem, one I still faced, was how virtual aHashimoto was going to get the drop on an RL thief.

CHAPTER 4

I PRESSED THE
BUTTON and became Ganker Jack.