Slum Online (4 page)

By June, the crowds had usually thinned out. Every April, the trains overflowed with overeager freshmen, but a month or two of school was enough to dull anyone’s enthusiasm. I hated each and every one of them. They were scrubs, ignorant of the laws of the rails. The subtle, silent language of the rush-hour commuter was foreign to them, so they shouted like tourists trying to make themselves understood. They bitched. They moaned. They caused trouble. They turned molehills into mountains. They were a pain in the ass.

I was a veteran. I’d been battle-hardened thanks to four years in rush hours—three in high school, one before entering university. I could spot a scrub a mile away. The hicks fresh off the farm were the worst. I’d even seen them in all-out brawls with salarymen, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred it was the poor salaryman who’d been wronged in the first place.

The trains were the domain of the salarymen. On the streets you cut dump trucks, taxis, and pizza delivery boys on their 50 cc bikes extra slack. You looked the other way if they bent the rules because you were just a guest on their turf. On trains it was the salarymen. They were holy men and this was their sacred ground. So no matter how empty the car was, I was content to stand quietly in my little corner by the door, out of respect.

My train pulled in to Shinjuku Station.

I set off on foot down Ome Highway. Before noon, campus was even emptier than the trains on the Yamanote. I glanced at the bulletin board on my way in and headed for my sociology class. The lecture had started seventy-five minutes ago; my timing couldn’t have been better. I took a seat along the window side of the lecture hall, two rows from the back, and filled in my name on the attendance sheet lying on the desk.

A man with thinning hair stood in front of the blackboard, lecturing with a mic in one hand. His hair looked like strips of dried seaweed. The color, the thickness, the sheen—perfect verisimilitude. The professor’s name was…I forget.

I cut the volume on my music, and the lecture came seeping into my ears. Seaweed Head was explaining that many animals live in groups as a way of self-regulating the population of the species.

There’s a type of wheat-eating beetle that takes up cannibalism when the swarm grows too dense. Rats raised in overcrowded conditions show signs of mental disorders. A species of rabbit living in the U.S. state of Minnesota develops liver failure and dies when the population density of the warren rises too high. Seaweed Head claimed that before the spread of democracy, humans had instinctively limited their own population. The advancement of civilization was undermining a basic societal function. It didn’t sound like the sort of ideas a sociology professor should be espousing.

Uncomfortably warm air filled the lecture hall from floor to ceiling. I felt an ache deep inside, at the core of my being. I stared at the attendance sheet and looked around the room. There were no familiar faces, no familiar names.

Most of the few friends I had made were gone by the end of May. They weren’t strutting around Shinjuku confident of their intellectual superiority or copping an attitude on the trains. They’d just faded away. I played online games with one of them, but lately I hadn’t seen him there or in RL. In a sociological sense, he had been a member of the university student species living on an overcrowded campus and had died for the good of the group. Maybe I would be next. If the natural order held sway on university grounds, it seemed inevitable.

Too stubborn to know when I was beat, I pored over the attendance sheet again and again. One name appeared more often than any other in the top row. My circle of friends had settled onto the bottom of the roster, and
she
had found a comfortable perch at the top. If I could write in her two-hundred-fifty-six-times-neater-than-mine handwriting, maybe scratching out notes during class wouldn’t be so bad. But if there was a proportional relationship between time spent studying and handwriting legibility, I was more than happy to rough it out with my hen scratches.

More sound FX signaled the end of class. Clutching the attendance sheet, I walked down to the front of the room and placed it on the podium. I turned to head back up the steps and there she was, sitting in the front row. The same face I’d seen from a mere eighty centimeters’ distance the day before.

She was wearing a collared silver-gray shirt with buttons down the front. Her 0.7 mm mechanical pencil rested in her hand. The strands of her neatly trimmed shoulder-length hair seemed less coarse than they had yesterday. Her glasses were nowhere to be seen.

I walked past without a word. She noticed me and looked up. I saw her lips form the word
thanks
. Her lips kept moving, but I couldn’t make out the rest of the sentence. I pulled the headphone out of my left ear and looked down at her. Today I was going to make an effort to communicate.

“Hey.”

“Thanks for yesterday,” she said with an awkward smile.

I told her it was no big deal and then hurried up the steps, once again turning away before she could speak. Fragments of a dozen things I might have said to her flashed through my head.
It wouldn’t have been fair. I was just covering my own ass. We’re two very different kinds of people.
But none of it would have done any good. I decided to skip my afternoon class and went straight home instead.

CHAPTER 3

I PRESSED THE
BUTTON. With a
click
, I became Tetsuo.

The same turquoise blue sky greeted me. The same light poles throwing their slightly jagged shadows on the ground. Beyond the lights stood the entrance to the town, barren and empty. Tetsuo winked into existence at that entrance, the same way he always did.

Versus Town
was an MMO—a massively multiplayer online fighting game. That means you didn’t fight against a computer opponent; you played the game against other players, all connected through the same network.

At any given moment, dozens of characters might appear and disappear at any of the city’s twenty-four gates. Passing through a gate in the first district, Itchōme, would save your character’s win/loss data. Itchōme was also the place to go if you wanted to change your character’s appearance, fighting school, or weight class. There was even a message board set up offering players yet another way to communicate with each other. In practice, people rarely altered their character’s appearance, school, or weight class, and if you were already online you didn’t need any more ways to communicate, so none of those features saw much use. Itchōme was huge, and the first thing everyone did when they got there was speed-dash out of it as fast as they could. Tetsuo found the right side of Main Street and started running.

There was no way to tell the identity of the player behind a character. It might be some salaryman you’d never met in your life or it could be the guy you sat next to in class who lived across the street. It could be anyone. The only thing that showed up on the screen was the character the player had created. It wasn’t much, but when you stepped up to go head to head with someone, it was everything.

When you got right down to it, a fighting game was nothing more than an elaborate match of rock-paper-scissors in which you were allowed to cheat. If you thought you saw rock coming, you gave the sign for paper. If it looked like scissors, you responded with rock. When someone threw a punch at you, you blocked. Punches and kicks don’t hurt while you’re blocking, so your attacker would probably try for a throw next. You couldn’t block a throw, but every throw could be countered with the right throw break. Throw breaks, in turn, left you vulnerable to strikes.

You had to read the battle, wait for your opponent to expose a weakness. Fake with rock, move in with scissors. Land blows where you could. Keep unavoidable damage to a bare minimum. That was what a virtual character like Tetsuo had to do to survive in this virtual town.

Tetsuo pushed the frosted glass door open and stepped into the arena. The arena was located in the second district of Versus Town, Nichōme. Log in and out in Itchōme, fight in Nichōme: Tetsuo’s daily commute.

The third and final district was Sanchōme, but it didn’t have anything to do with the meat of the game. After I first opened my account, I’d taken Tetsuo for a spin around Sanchōme, but it wasn’t much more than a polygonal slum.

When they could hook your brain up to electrodes like in those old sci-fi novels and movies so you could feel, smell, even taste the virtual world around you, a place like Sanchōme might not be so bad. But the residents of Versus Town couldn’t touch, they couldn’t smell, and they couldn’t taste. They could only fight. The only windows players had into Versus Town were their lousy monitors. The only way to control your character was with one stick and three buttons.

Tetsuo walked across the arena to the training rooms in back for his usual combo warm-up routine. A gamer that relied on fast reflexes was a lot like a katana. To stay sharp, you had to hone your skills each and every day. If you took a day off, you were that much weaker.

For the most part, action games required your muscles to learn certain patterns of motion and execute them with blinding speed at precisely the right moment. Get carried away, and it could have a negative impact on you in RL. Suppose you spent ten hours a day playing
Tetris
. Next thing you know you’re walking down the street thinking about where to place that nice square building up ahead.

Fighting games are the same. Everyone sacrifices something from RL to spend time fighting in Versus Town.

Tanaka was in the arena with dozens of characters in the queue, waiting their turn to fight him. He was one of the top four, the best in Versus Town. Everyone knew who they were, so when one of them showed up in the arena, an endless stream of characters would arrive to sign up for a match. Tonight was no exception.

Since the time I opened my
Versus Town
account, I had wanted to see Tetsuo join the top four. All I had to do was defeat Pak, the best of the best, and Tetsuo would reign supreme. I didn’t doubt for a second that everyone else waiting in that arena queue had the same idea.

I wasn’t after virtual fame or notoriety. Tetsuo was already well into the ranks of the elite, and he never had trouble finding someone willing to face him in the arena. But if I made it into the top four, the internal barometer I had of my own skill would finally be calibrated against something like an objective set of standards.

Games are just another form of entertainment. Being good at a game doesn’t raise your grades, and it doesn’t help you find a job. It wouldn’t do much of anything to help you in RL. Maybe that’s why I wanted some sign, some token of achievement in the virtual world to show for my hard work.

Tetsuo finished practicing on the training dummy. He stepped out onto the arena floor. There were thirty-three people in Tanaka’s queue. I wanted to put Tetsuo up against him, but I wasn’t in the mood to wait half the night to do it.

Tanaka was fighting a snake boxer in the middle of the arena. It looked like a good match. The snake boxer was a newcomer, someone I’d never seen before. Newcomer or no, he was holding his own against Tanaka. Come to think of it, the character that ganked 963 out in Sanchōme was supposed to be a snake boxer too.
Hmm
.

The match ended. The snake boxer had won. Text bubbles started popping up over the heads of the characters crowded near Tetsuo.

> Some guy just beat Tanaka!

> No way.

> Screen shot or it didn’t happen.

As others read the bubbles and pecked out answers in reply, a chain reaction threatened to fill the screen with text.

> Who did it?

> I dunno.

> What’s the big deal? Even Tanaka has to lose sometime.

> Dude, a scrub doesn’t just come along and wtfpwn Tanaka.

> You think it was that guy from Sanchōme?

> We just witnessed history, man. History!

> Damn, I need some food.

> I go bio for a bath, and all hell breaks loose!

> I can’t see. Is this even hitting you?

> TEXT BUBBLES ARE ANNOYING.

> Dude, caps.

The comments rose one after another. It was like watching a cel-shaded pot of boiling water spill across the arena as the giddy wave of hysteria spread.

Tanaka might play a hundred matches a day, so on average he was bound to lose two or three. Anyone could get tired and have an off night. It was the second season tournament that had everyone buzzing about the loss. It was getting closer, and you could feel the tension mounting.