Yvvaros: The Clash of Worlds (27 page)

Kaoru held her hands apart as though representing the two servers with them.

“I’ve already managed to copy the basic Yvvaros server info onto it,” she said. “All we need to get from the official server is the most basic of world state information. It’s only a few hundred gigabytes at most. We can copy it over using my hardware hack in a couple of hours.”

Luke ran a hand through his hair.

“But what happens to the people who’ve gone all in?” he asked. “Copying it over, we might as well just be making a copy of all of them. Are we just going to delete the original when we’re done?”

His mind ached as he struggled with what that would mean.

Would that kill Tess, the one that I know? Would I just be replacing her with an exact replica, copying her like she was a file on a hard drive?

“You underestimate me, Luke,” said Kaoru. “We’re going to freeze the official server’s state, first. Any player that’s logged in at the time will be logged out. All of the players who have gone all in will experience nothing, no interruption. To them it will just seem like time in the real world jumped a bit out of sync.”

“Okay,” said Luke.

“While the server’s frozen, we copy the world state over in chunks, deleting each one once it’s made it to my private server. Once that’s done, we wipe the entire thing once more, just to be safe, and then install a redirect.”

“Okay…”

There’s a chance that I’m not quite as computer literate as I thought I was…

“The redirect only has to work once for each player for their game client to accept my private server as the new main server, so it doesn’t matter if the government finds it and deletes it. As long as it’s up for a day or so, all of the regular Yvvaros players will make the switch with us.”

“Okay, okay.” Luke held up his hand and nodded. “That sounds like it will work. At least, I think?”

“It will work,” said Kaoru. “To be honest, it would probably be far easier to make a basic copy of the world server and leave the old one, but that… is a bit complicated, philosophically speaking.”

“Okay, so once we’ve installed your hardware hack, we just wait for the world state to transfer and then get out of there?”

Kaoru nodded.

“That’s it,” she said. “It’s not a foolproof plan, but I think it will work.”

Luke looked over at her, still adjusting to her as a girl in the real world. She looked confident and ready.

“What’s in it for you, anyway?” he asked. “I still don’t understand why you’d want to put everything on the line here. I mean, I have someone to protect…”

“I’m looking at the big picture, Luke,” she replied. “This isn’t about who controls a video game. It’s about whether or not an entire world gets to self-determine.”

“Fair enough.”

Luke stood up. The situation had moved quickly ever since he’d first met Kaoru. The two of them had never taken the time to really talk with each other, get a sense of each other’s character. Still, he knew that he could trust her. There was something in her eyes that Luke understood.

“I still have preparations to make,” said Kaoru. “You’re welcome to hang around here for now, but it probably won’t be until tomorrow at the earliest before we can head out.”

Luke shook his head.

“No, that’s okay,” he said. “Kaoru… thank you.”

“Don’t thank me Luke, we haven’t won yet,” she replied. “And besides, you’re helping me just as much as I’m helping you.”

Luke nodded, and then left the motel room.

He walked back to his house, unsure of what to do next. Getting into Yvvaros was the natural choice, but the real world had a curious pull over him. The time that he’d spent in-game had made the regular world feel foreign.

What’s going to happen once we liberate the world state server? Will more people start going all in? Will I go all in?

A mother pushing a stroller gave him a strange look as she passed. Luke realized that he’d been staring at her baby and smiled apologetically. There weren’t many people out and it made the town feel lonely.

It was noon when Luke made it back home. The lawn was overgrown, and without his dad’s car in the driveway, the house looked abandoned. He walked up the steps and headed inside.

“Hey Luke.”

“Jesus!” He flinched back in surprise, almost tripping as he tried to steady himself. “Sam, what the hell are you doing here?”

Sam was sitting on the living room couch. Her hands were folded in her lap, and her face was a mixture of disappointment and defeat. She looked genuinely depressed.

“They cancelled school today,” said Sam. “Or rather, they shifted it into a ‘state of hiatus’.”

“What does that mean?” asked Luke. “And that still doesn’t explain why you…”

“I don’t really have many other places to be, Luke.” Sam stood up and walked over to him. “Everybody thinks I’m overreacting to what’s been going on, but I’m not. You… you know I’m not, even if you’re standing on the other side of the divide.”

“Sam…” Luke tried to think of something, anything that he could say to pull her out of her funk.

“The government is initializing a mental health screening program,” she said. “At our school alone, a third of the students have gone all in. Middle aged and older people have started doing it, too.”

“What?”

“Third Life VR,” said Sam. “It’s more of a social network than a game, but it was released a week ago, and you can go all in using the VR headsets, just like with Yvvaros.”

She almost never refers to Yvvaros by name. She’s really seeing it now.

“Sam…” Luke reached his arm out and rubbed her shoulder reassuringly.

“Luke, this is it,” she whispered. “The world as we know it is coming to an end. More people are killing themselves over these games than are being born. The streets are going to be empty.”

Luke opened his mouth, and then stopped. The vision from the Caves of Exton popped into his head, and he remembered how his neighborhood had looked.

Was that a vision of the future? Are people really going to opt out of their physical existence, and go digital on a large scale?

“Sam, it’s going to be okay,” said Luke. She shook her head and smiled.

“It’s going to be okay for people like you.” She locked eyes with him. “For people like me, people who don’t want to have to give up their humanity, it’s not going to be okay. It’s not going to be anything like okay.”

Sam pointed to the kitchen table. There was another bag of food on it, along with a note. Luke looked back over at her and saw that she was already making her way toward the door.

“Goodbye, Luke,” she said. “Please, be safe.”

Luke didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to say goodbye to her, despite all of the grief she had caused him. He wasn’t sure if this would be the last time he saw her.

“I’m sorry, Sam,” he said. “If you ever do give Yvvaros a try… please come find me. My name is Kato, in-game.”

Sam stopped in the doorway. Her hands clenched for a moment, and then she continued through the door.

Luke stood in the living room for a while after she’d left. He thought about what she’d told him. He thought about where the world was headed, and if there was any coming back from it. He thought about how much things had changed.

I never saw this coming. Nobody did.

Luke walked upstairs to his room. His headset was right where he’d left it. He walked over to his desk and took a seat, booting up his laptop and starting to pull the headset on.

His phone vibrated. Luke pulled it out of his pocket and saw that it was a text from Kaoru.

Luke, you have to check on Silverstrike in the real world ASAP. Something’s wrong.

He stared at the message for a moment, and then stood up from his chair. Luke got the strangest sense of déjà vu as he rushed out of his room and downstairs. The memory of the time he’d found Emily in the real world was still fresh in his mind.

Hold on, Ben. Just hold on.

Ben’s house was just down the street from Luke’s. He broke into a sprint the second he reached the sidewalk, pushing his tired, sedentarily weakened legs as hard as he could.

By the time Luke had made it there, he was exhausted. He slowed to a jogging pace as he ran up Ben’s driveway. The weeks of sitting at his desk were taking their toll, the short trip left him feeling fatigued and wiped out. He threw the front door open and moved toward Ben’s room as fast as his tired legs would go.

“Ben?” Luke called out as he rushed up the steps. “Ben, are you okay? Ben!”

He pushed his way into his friend’s room and saw Ben lying in a tangled heap next to his desk. There was a large puddle of vomit on Ben’s desk, and a smaller vomit stain next to his head on the carpet.

Luke wasn’t surprised, not really. He hurried over, dropping to his knees and shook Ben while he felt for a pulse.

“Wake up!” Luke grimaced, feeling the intensity of his own fear and concern. “Wake up, Ben!”

Ben didn’t stir, but his body felt warm. Luke found a faint pulse. He didn’t waste any time, keeping one hand on his friend as pulled his phone out with the other and dialed 911.

“Hello? It’s my friend.” Luke stared at Ben’s crumpled form. The whole situation felt surreal. “He’s… overdosed, I think.”

He spent a minute giving the dispatcher Ben’s address, and then hung up the phone. Luke sighed. He felt overwhelmed with guilt.

This is at least partially my fault. I’ve been ignoring his drug abuse for weeks, months even.

“Ben…” Luke crouched back next to his friend and in a panic he began to shake him. “Ben. Wake up. Ben, this isn’t funny, wake the fuck up!”

He pulled Ben up by the shoulders and watched as his friend’s head limply swung back. Ben’s drug induced coma looked a lot like someone playing Yvvaros. Something that Ben had suggested to him a week ago suddenly came to mind.

Is it that different? Ben overdoses when he does too many drugs. Players go all in when they get too serious about Yvvaros.

Luke tried to push the thought out of his head as he stared at his friend’s limp body. He could hear the sound of the ambulance’s siren outside.

CHAPTER 30

Despite his insistence, Luke was not allowed to ride to the hospital in the ambulance with Ben. He felt like he needed to be there, needed to do something, contribute what information he had, but there was little that he could do. The EMT asked Luke what drugs Ben had taken, and all he had to offer was his best guess.

He was drinking, and smoking weed, but what else? Coke? Heroin? I never asked, and he never talked about it.

Luke wasn’t sure whether to head to the hospital with Ben, or to go back to Yvvaros. He stood in the street for several moments after the ambulance had disappeared into the distance, distracted and discouraged.

His phone vibrated. It was another text from Kaoru. It was just as dire as the last one had been.

One of the guilds left our alliance and claimed an Elemental Well behind our back. Get in-game, now.

Luke sighed. He stared off in the direction that the ambulance had gone in, and then slowly turned toward home.

Ten minutes later, Luke was back in his room. He pulled on his headset and entered Yvvaros, dreading the newest catastrophe he would find waiting for him.

Dunidan’s Rest was swimming with players and activity. It was late in the afternoon, and Luke was standing outside the general store. Several members of Athena’s Wrath were watching him, and had been since the moment he’d logged in.

I almost feel like I’m in Stark Town, being gawked at by people who worship the Hero of Kantor.

He waved at them.

“Have any of you seen Kaoru?” asked Luke. “Or Tess?”

“Tess is over by the farm talking to a new player that showed up,” said one of them.

Luke nodded, and headed that way. He rounded the corner of the inn, moving toward the oasis. Sure enough, Tess was standing with her hands on her hips, talking to a female player that Luke found vaguely familiar.

“I don’t believe you…” Tess was frowning, and she shook her head.

“I know it’s a bit outlandish, but it’s the truth,” said the girl. “I am who I say I am.”

Both Tess and the new player turned to face Luke as he walked up to them. The new player had shiny black hair, a petite frame, and a face that Luke instantly recognized.

“Kaoru…” He crossed his arms, a bit of Tess’s suspicion spreading to him. “What’s going on?”

“Thank you.” Kaoru smiled and nodded, but Tess’s frown only deepened.

“Kaoru is a man! This could be anyone, Luke!”

“I met her earlier today in the real world,” said Luke. “And she looked, well, a lot like she looks now. Why the switch?”

Kaoru sighed and shook her head.

“Megwin has jumped ship, Kato,” she said. “One of my spies sent word that he’s decided to claim the Elemental Wells for himself.”

“What?”

“It’s a power play,” said Kaoru. “He wants the city of Makorin for his guild. He sent out a raiding party to run the same route that you did. I encountered them at the base of Shahidi’s Vengeance, but the bastards were too strong. They killed my main avatar, hence my new appearance.”

Damn it. This is the last thing we need…

“We’re so close,” said Luke. “Why would he pull something like this now?”

Kaoru shrugged.

“It may have been his plan from the beginning,” she said. “Or maybe he’s worried about what we’ll do with Makorin once the Arbiters are overthrown. It doesn’t matter.”

Luke opened his bag and began searching through it. Two of the Elemental Crystals were still inside, but the first one he’d acquired was missing.

“What level are you at now, Kaoru?” asked Luke.

“15,” she said. “It’s going to take me at least a couple of hours to grind my way back up to the strength of my other avatar.”

Luke shook his head.

“I have to move now,” he said. “This is going to throw off the entire plan if we don’t put a stop to it.”

“The raiding party stopped at Megwin’s Bay after claiming the first Elemental Crystal,” said Kaoru. “Odds are good that it’s there. If you can talk with Megwin, try to reason with him. Otherwise…”