The NextWorld 02: Spawn Point (16 page)

Even if I was “lucky” enough to work for some game company, creating the very thing that I loved, I knew I'd become nothing more than a piece of a machine, with no real contributing power to the overall product. Another zero in a sea of binary.

The entrance to DOTbiz looks so generically uninspired, I'm immediately bored. There's a minimalist style to everything. Gray, monotone colors cover the soft edges of every wall. Ferns and philodendrons spot the open areas, perfectly green and spaced an appropriate distance apart. Someone designed everything to neutralize emotion and stamp out individual thought. I'm ready to fall into a dazed trance when I remind myself what's waiting on the other side of the arched gates.

When we land, Fantom summons a different vehicle from her inventory that can accommodate multiple avatars. It's a brown, four-door sedan that looks like every other vehicle entering the domain. I'm about to complain when I realize that it's the perfect way to blend in with the monotony.

“I'm drivin',” Fantom says as she climbs into the driver's seat.

I climb in the passenger side and look over the seat at Xen and Raev in the back. “This is going to work. Right?”

“Course it's goin' to work,” Fantom says, answering for them.

“I haven't stepped foot in here since a job shadow I did for my DOTedu senior class project,” Raev says. “I promised myself I'd never come back...”

“We won't be here long,” Xen says, popping a pill and peeking out his window like he's on a safari in a foreign land.

I look back and forth at them both, watching them clasping hands and smiling, offering each other their strength.

They were safe before I showed up. They were in a place that didn't threaten their viewpoints. There was no risk of upsetting everything they accomplished. Their life protected them. They had achieved their goal. They were able to relax in the reward together.

Cyren and I used to have that.

“Thank you for doing this,” I say to Raev. “I know that I already put Xen in danger once. Now here I am, doing it again.”

Raev reaches forward and puts her hand on my arm. “Xen's a big boy. He can make his own decisions. Besides, Metaversalism teaches us that the more we bleed, the thicker the scar will be that protects us.”

I'm about to call her out on how little sense that lesson makes to me, but I stop myself.

“I want you to know how much I appreciate everything you're doing. I promise I'll get you two back to your church as soon as I can.”

“As long as you promise to visit us more often,” Xen says with a smile.

“Of course.”

“And maybe attend a service or two while you're there?”

“We're next,” Fantom says as our car rolls through the archway.

I turn around in my seat, thankful for the rescue from Xen's request. There's a beep in my ear, then a chime of approval. The same screen pops up in front of each of our faces, acknowledging our companion's family-approved DOTbiz account. It contains a long, legal document listing what we can and can't do, how far away from Raev we're able to be at any given time inside the domain, and the names of prohibited streets. We all press the accept button without reading it and our car is thrust into DOTbiz.

The windowless skyscrapers of the domain all look exactly the same. There is no commercialization or marketing allowed here, just utilitarian storage space. Each office structure stretches toward a sky that isn't sunny, nor cloudy. There's no contrast. The road is the same color as the sidewalk which is the same color as the buildings that happen to be the same, monotone gray as the sky. A deep, choking depression hovers over the domain like a cloud of smog. We slide through the streets, passing company cars that offer a minimal amount of bandwidth. The employees inside hang their heads low as they make the slow crawl to whatever employer deemed them useful enough to pay.

“And to think, you had to give up all this to become a hacker,” I say with a smirk.

“I should have had a choice,” Fantom says, her jaw firmly clenched.

I can tell my joke made her angry, but I don't understand why. She has an inventory of items, she doesn't have to pay for a thing, she's got unlimited bandwidth, and DOTgov barely knows she exists. If that isn't freedom, I don't know what is.

The streets of DOTbiz roll under our car, each intersection passing us like clockwork, every block the exact same size and shape. The designers meant for the uniformity of everything to bring a sense of fairness and equality to the domain, giving every business a fair advantage, but the idea is ludicrous. As soon as they unleash their products into DOTcom, the company with the most money for marketing always comes out on top.

The monotone landscape bores me into submission. I'm woken from the glaze covering my eyes when Fantom says, “It's just ahead.”

The mapping software built into the vehicle directed her here, but to the rest of us, it's just another building with one unmarked door on the front.

As we step out of the sedan, it disappears back in to Fantom's inventory. There's a moment of shared hesitation before we enter the building, but I push past it, knowing that I'm getting closer to Cyren with every step I take. I open the door and step into a white room. A turret drops down from the ceiling and my gamer instincts force me to duck and roll to the side. The turret stays locked on to me, but instead of spitting out bullets, it scans my body.

“You do not have permission to enter.”

I look over my shoulder as the rest of the group enters. The turret spins, scans each one, and repeats the same phrase.

“I hope you have a way to hack this,” I say to Fantom.

She rolls her eyes at me and says to the turret, “We're requestin' guest passes to visit employee name: Grael.”

The turret blinks as it rests in silence. I glance at Raev and Xen who look extraordinarily nervous. They look to me, hoping that I have something to offer them in the way of assurances. I divert my eyes.

“Guest access granted for one hour,” the turret says before lifting back into the ceiling.

Fantom smiles back at us as the door on the opposite side of the room opens. Xen and Raev step forward to follow her through. I slip past everyone, unable to slow myself. I'm afraid of what will happen if I stop for too long. I have to keep moving, toward my goal, toward Cyren.

Shoulder high cubicle walls intersect each other, creating a well-organized maze that stretches into the infinite distance. There are no workstations inside the cubicles and no employees doing any actual work.

With a few selections in my social menu screen I manage to find Grael's avatar in the center of the endless room. I highlight his location for everyone and make my way down corridor after corridor of beige cubes. A single chair sits inside each one, but the walls are bare. It's an empty room full of tinier empty rooms. It's what I imagined DOTbiz to look like in my nightmares.

When I find the middle of the office, I see Grael leaning back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. He looks the same, with his red dreadlocks pulled behind his head, but his bulletproof vest and gas mask are missing. He's wearing a plain gray suit coat, his tie loosely hanging around his neck. Other than a single screen floating in front of him, his cubicle is empty.

He seemed so powerful to me inside the game. I found him intimidating, lording his higher Level over me. Now he looks dull. Weak.

“Grael?” Xen says as he touches his shoulder.

Grael jerks and looks at us, rubbing his thumbs into his eyes. “I should have known
you'd
come here.”

“What are you doing?” I ask, my eyes scanning the emptiness around him.

“Waiting.”

We all exchange nervous glances, unsure of his state of mind.

“What are you waitin' for, yo?” Fantom asks.

He shrugs his shoulders. “I'm waiting. I'm waiting until I can't wait any longer.” He leans back in his chair again and spins, staring up at the ceiling as it twirls above him. He speaks fast, his mouth barely keeping up with the chaos of his thoughts.

“Do you know that they forced me to work here? It was the only place I could log-in to. This domain. This site. This company. Just me. In this room. All day. Every day. They meant it as some kind of punishment. But do you want to know a secret?”

He stops spinning and leans forward, staring at us with a devious smile stretching from ear to ear.

“I didn't want to be anywhere else.” He opens his arms wide as if he's presenting the room to us. “This is where I belong. In my home, with my children.”

“Your 'children?'” Raev asks, waiting for us to admit that Grael seems as crazy to us as he does to her.

“He's talkin' about the NPCs,” Fantom says, crossing her arms. “Aren't you?”

Grael looks at me and says, “You were right all along, kid. Once I was outside the game world and I could look at the code, I saw how much it had changed from what I originally wrote.” Grael's voice is shaking with excitement. “They were learning. They were conscious. They were self-aware. All of them.”

He stands up and rushes toward me. I flinch, thinking it's some kind of attack, but the non-PvP area logo is flashing in my view. His face is inches from mine, his eyes wild with excitement.

“I wouldn't have trusted anyone else to protect them. I
had
to do it myself. It was an honor. A privilege. I got to witness them making history.”

He pulls away from me, throwing his hand into the air as he continues his tirade.

“I tried to tell them! I tried to show everyone what I had created. But they wouldn't listen. They thought I was crazy.”

He starts laughing. It's a cackling, high-pitched laugh, like a young boy trying to mask crying.

“They were acting like I acted when you tried to convince me that my game was alive.”

“It's okay,” I say, trying to calm him down, but he twirls around and puts himself in my face again.

“No it's not,” he mumbles. “It's not okay. I failed. I failed to protect them. My children. Maybe if NextWorld had known the truth, maybe they would have done more. Maybe they would have helped me.”

He turns to Fantom and says, “I don't know how the virus got in. We had so much of the game locked down. No connection. No patches. The firewall just dropped away. I've looked at the data over and over. I don't know what I did wrong.”

Fantom says nothing. There's a long pause as I hesitate to reply.

“You didn't do anything wrong,” I say, almost unable to admit the truth. “It was my fault.”

Everyone flashes a stunned look in my direction.

“I died. I was being stupid, going on an adventure that I didn't need to go on. All because I was bored. Because I wanted to keep playing. Because... I don't know. The civilians took down the firewall so they could reroute my spawn point. They did it to save me... and they ended up dooming themselves in the process.”

Fantom shakes her head. “You both need to stop blamin' yourselves. That virus wasn't some malware floatin' around NextWorld. It was an intentional attack, yo.”

“Who would do that?” Xen asks.

“I don't know,” I say with both hands curled into fists. “But when I find out, they're going to pay.”

“The other question is
why
would someone do that,” Raev asks. “Why would someone want to destroy something you worked so hard to create?”

“I didn't create them,” Grael says, his body losing its energy as he sits back down in his cubicle. “They were a fluke. A mistake. I made an accidental connection. The NPCs I designed should never have been capable of the things they were doing. I thought maybe with more time I could understand...”

“What if I told you there was still time,” Fantom says.

I can't help smiling when Grael perks up. I know the look in his eyes. That renewed sense of hope. The chance to gain back everything he's lost.

“When was the game deleted?” Fantom asks. “When did the virus delete the last line of code?”

Grael looks confused as he mumbles, “The virus deleted the last line of code this morning.”

“I need to know the
exact
time.”

Grael wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and opens a screen in front of him, accessing the game company records.

“It was 0818, NextWorld time.”

Fantom opens her own screen, swiping through menus. With a few flicks of her wrist, she shares a timer with all of us that appears in the corner of our views. It's counting down from just under eighteen hours.

“Open your workstation,” Fantom says as she pulls up a chair next to Grael in his cubicle. “We've got to find the location code for the game world data or we'll be wanderin' around the Trash Bin forever, yo.”

“The Trash Bin?”

For once, Fantom rolls her eyes at someone other than me. As search screens open in front of her she says, “Do your best to keep up.”

Raev and Xen join me in a nearby cubicle. I'm trying to catch up to my emotions without imploding from the pressure. Xen sits down across from me on the floor with that stupid grin on his face. It's driving me crazy.

“What?”

He tilts his head to the side and says, “I'm just... happy to see you, Kade. You were trapped in that log-out loop for so long, you know? I tried to keep my hope that maybe Cyren could convince the civilian NPCs to reinstate the log-out, but after a while I had to accept the fact that they weren't going to sacrifice themselves just to let you go. Which meant the only hope in seeing you again would be for DOTgov to do a cold reboot of your E-Womb. The idea that they would fry your nanomachines was just too much for me.”

Raev reaches out and touches Xen as she says, “I think it reminded him of his own time stuck in the loop.”

Xen pops another pill and says, “I found ways to deal with it.”

“The NPCs chose to release me when their world was gone, when there was... nothing left to fight for.” I suck in a deep breath, forcing myself to push forward. “But they were wrong. There
was
something left to fight for. Cyren was still alive. We could have survived. We could have...”

I lose my words. I'm not sure whether I'm sad, or angry, or maybe something else entirely. It gets all mixed up inside me. I need a villain, an enemy, something to blame, something to fight. I wish I could just shoot something.