As Worlds Drifted Read online

  “Sorry, I acted instinctively, blame my genetic coding," I apologized. "Would you mind just tossing that thing back to me?"

  "I think I'll keep it."

  Cheeky bastard! Who does this nerd think he is? "Listen, Nick, just toss it over. I'm not in the mood."

  "Tell you what. Why don't you drop by my house tomorrow afternoon and pick it up? Wouldn't want to risk breaking it, would we."

  Before I could answer, or throw anything even more lethal at him, he closed his window and pulled the blind.

  I had to wait the whole day for Nick to get back from school. It was excruciating. I was basically wearing the same thing I had been wearing since my dad died—a ratty pair of jeans and one of his college sweatshirts. I smelled of him. I hadn't even bothered to put on a pair of shoes as I ran across the lawn towards Nick’s house. This, paired with my buzz cut, must have been a real shocker.

  Nick opened his front door with a smile rather than a smirk, "Come on in, my parents are still at work." He seemed totally unfazed by the way I looked. I should have knocked him out cold then and there, but I wanted to get my snow globe first. Besides, that smile went well with his face. His eyes were blue.

  "That won't be necessary, just hand over what's mine."

  "Possession is nine-tenths of the law."

  "Just hand it over."

  "First, come in and check out my setup."

  "What the fu—"

  "My computer setup," he sighed.

  Whatever I need to do to get back what is mine. I reluctantly followed him up the stairs. Why does he think I would give a crap about his computer setup? On his desk, he had a total of three monitors. What a mega nerd. It was surprisingly clean for a gamer's room, not that I'd ever been in one. No lingerie models on the walls, no empty pizza boxes scattered across the floor, and the air was more or less breathable.

  He pointed to the wall opposite the window, there was a large dent where the drywall had caved in.

  "No way," I said, cheeks burning.

  "Yes way. You're loco, lady. Speaking of loco, I've got just the fix for you, sort of like anger management class," he said, motioning to the desk chair. “It’s called Alphacore.”

  "I don't have time, Nick, just give me the globe," besides, that chair was probably in violation of scores of health codes anyhow.

  "From what I can tell, you have nothing but time, Lily, and it's slowly killing you."

  "Whatever, Dr. Jung."

  "Just sit."

  "Please, Nick, just hand me the globe. Don't try to socialize me, let me crawl back under that rock where I came from. I like it under that rock."

  "Fine, here," Nick tossed the globe and pointed towards the door. "You don't know what you're missing." He actually looked disappointed for real.

  Whatever, it won't kill me, I don't think. "Ten minutes, that's all I got," I sighed and plunked down in front of his screens. "There seems to be something wrong with your screen here. Did it like melt in the sun or something?"

  "Funny... it's curved. Improves immersion—at least for first and third-person shooters. It's the latest Samsung, refresh rate of 240. Set me back more than 500.” Seeing my eyes glaze over, he stopped talking and put a set of over-ear headphones on me and slid a transparent visor down over my eyes. The screen came to life as the pixels crackled in tandem with my synapses. "The visor has two functions," Nick continued in his irritating geek-speak. "It further enhances immersion by creating an illusion of presence, and it picks up your facial expressions, which allows realistic interaction with other players."

  "You sound like a used car salesman."

  "Enough theory, time for practical application. We're gonna take it slow. First, you'll just learn to move around in the world." He leaned forward from behind me and took my right hand, blood rushed to my head as my spine tingled. "You hold the mouse with this one." He seemed unaware of the intimacy of his gestures, and that I'd basically touched no one for weeks. "Left hand on the WASD keys here on the keyboard."

  "The what keys?"

  "W-A-S-D keys. You use them to move around. This keyboard cost more than two Benjamins."

  "Oh, I'm sure it did, look, it has all these extra buttons and pretty colors."

  Nick continued to ignore my jabs, "The left mouse button you use to fire your weapon, right mouse button to turn. Spacebar to jump. Control to duck. You'll be playing one of my alt characters, wouldn't want anything to happen to Nuffian."

  "Nuffian?"

  "He's the character I play with… my avatar."

  "Couldn't find a better name? You know, like Lancelot or Maximus Prime, or Legolas?"

  Nick took over the mouse again and rapidly scrolled through various menus. "Here, take SoomoBrother. He's really good with a hunting knife, and pretty dependable with a standard rifle. He won't let you down."

  What must have been SoomoBrother appeared on the screen. He looked a bit like a hunter with elven ears. "Sure, sounds fine." God, what a nerd. Speaking of his character as though he were real. "But whether he is dependable or not must depend on how I play him, right?"

  Nick pressed a button on the keyboard and, suddenly, in front of me was a landscape of detailed beauty, with tall grass swaying in waves of wind on rolling hills. SoomoBrother had his back turned to me and was taking in the same landscape as I was. Trees dotted the prairie giving some perspective towards the towering snowcapped mountains in the distance and the clouds that swirled among the peaks. I felt Nick place his right hand over mine and push down my ring finger with his, and as he moved the mouse slightly to the left, the prairie turned with it as SoomoBrother turned. I was suddenly facing the other direction with the mountains to my back and a gurgling stream with an accompanying stone bridge in front of me.

  "Press and hold W," Nick said from behind me. I did as he said, and SoomoBrother started to walk towards the stream.

  "What happens if I go in? Does SoomoBrother drown?" I didn't wait for an answer. The water swirled around his legs as he struggled through the swift water before he emerged on the other side. He didn't fall, or drown.

  I looked up at the sky. There was a moon. Wait, there were two... three... four moons. One looked to be five times the size of our moon. Our moon? Somehow, I managed to hit the shift button and I started to run. I tried the rest of the WASD keys, moving left, right, and backwards. At first, my left-hand/right-hand coordination was seriously flawed. More often than not, I wasn't facing the way I was moving, causing me to hit objects such as trees and boulders. Eventually, I got the hang of it and could use the mouse to turn my head in the same direction I was moving—what a relief.

  I had left the stream and prairie behind. A forest of white and gray birch trees enveloped me; the odd birdsong punctuated the comforting silence. A rustle in the undergrowth and out into a clearing, not 20 feet from me, stepped a fawn—or this world's approximation of one. It scraped a hoof along the ground and bent down to nibble on whatever root it had exposed, oblivious to my existence.

  I left the fawn behind and found a path that led to a dirt road, which led to what looked like a village. The village was abandoned, most of the windows were broken, and doors swung eerily on their hinges. A godforsaken church rose in the middle of the village. I navigated the scattered tombstones, and against my basic survival instincts, proceeded to pull open the church doors. I stepped through the foyer, where dusty prayer books with red covers lay in piles on the stone floor, and entered the sanctuary. The sun slanted through what was left of the tall windows, highlighting dozens of pews strewn about as though God had decided to play Mikado. Suddenly, behind me, I heard footsteps and the door pushed open.

  “Lily? Hey, Lily...” I felt something touch my shoulder. I whipped around, the hunting knife in my right hand, ready to kill, but saw nothing. I felt a touch on my shoulder again, so I whipped around the other way, crouching, ready to pounce.

  "Hey, Lil…" I shot out of the chair, ripping the headphones off my head. In front of me stood Nick. "I'm glad you like
it and all, but it's ten. I actually have a meet-up in Alphacore to get to."

  "What?!" Did he leave at some point and eat dinner and come back without telling me? Whatever happened, I'd just wasted five hours of my life, and it was time to go.

  "I gotta run," I said, already halfway out the door.

  "You forgot something!"

  Shit! I spun around, swooped up the snow globe, and hurried home.

  Tristan Casco

  "Here you are, hun," the waitress smiled as she slid a plate in front of him with one hand, and poured coffee with the other. "Your eggs will be out in a minute."

  "Thanks, Maggy." Tristan Casco always found comfort in diners—an oasis of simplicity in a world that felt increasingly alien. Tristan sighed as he poured milk powder into his coffee.

  A little while later, Tristan over-tipped and stood up, trying not to wince as pain shot through his right leg. He threw on his suit jacket and headed out the door just as the first faint rays of day hit this rundown part of town, where auto repair shops and tattoo parlors had yet to make way for bearded vegans and their microbreweries. A block or two down the street, Tristan swiped his card and glanced up into the camera that was carefully concealed in the wall above him. The nondescript half-rusted door in front of him slid open, and he stepped in as it hissed shut behind him. He grabbed the rail as the floor dropped, and he was whisked to the floors below. He stepped out onto the landing and took in the scene that never failed to contribute to his alienation.

  Below him stretched a large bustling room with high ceilings and rows of computer workstations. With massive screens on the walls, the room looked a lot like mission control at Cape Canaveral. Tristan walked on down to his workstation, doing his best not to limp. Maria Castillo was already at her station to his right, as was Frank Weber to his left.

  "What've we got?" Tristan asked as he sank into his chair in front of his six monitors, two rows of three.

  "You know, your usual money laundering, embezzlement, human trafficking, and a smattering of terrorist chatter," Maria answered without looking up.

  Tristan put on his headset and flipped down the visor. He typed some commands into the keyboard, which incidentally wasn't the typical gamer keyboard, it had at least twice the number of keys and a couple of built-in mini-LCDs.

  He glanced out across the room at the dozens of people playing computer games. The average age of these nerds couldn't be more than 22. Tristan was by far the oldest tool in the joint, with the possible exception of the janitor. Towards the front of the room was the Moba cluster—the agents surveilling the multiplayer online battle arena games such as League of Legends, Heroes of the Storm, Smite, and Dota 2. In the middle were the ultra-nerds who followed card games like Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering. At the back, where his team was seated, were the first and third-person shooters like Overwatch, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Fortnite, PlayerUnknown, and, of course, Alphacore Legacy.

  This was the FBI Cyber Gaming Unit HQ, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Together, Maria, Frank, and Tristan made up the Alphacore Legacy Task Team. As more and more human communication took place through these online gaming platforms, the federal government had seen a need to bolster its own presence in these communities. So, this had become Tristan's fate, to sit on his ass all day with a bunch of kids and pretend to enforce the nation’s laws while playing computer games.

  It wasn't his choice. He'd never been a gamer as a kid. He'd been the sports kid. But once his leg was shattered on a mission a few years back, he'd been placed in this hell hole. His lack of computing experience had proven to be downright embarrassing when he had first started at the CGU. They had to send him for three weeks of nerd boot camp.

  Despite his lack of gaming experience, he started out as team leader. Maria and Frank had taken the whole thing well enough. Tristan liked to believe that he contributed to creating a cohesive and balanced team, and for the past half a year, their Alphacore team had been among the top performers in the unit.

  Tristan had taken the skills he had learned on the street and brought them online. He had pioneered the use of paid informants. Even the young nerds at the CGU were required to go through the basic FBI training at the academy in Quantico, though it was tailored to their specific needs. The agents at the CGU did pack heat, but they rarely got to unpack said heat. Tristan felt it was his duty to make sure that his team was up to par, so he would take them to the shooting range to top up their firearm skills and organize supplementary hand to hand combat training. He even took them on a weekend of advanced interrogation techniques. All the things you can do in your free time when you don't have kids—of course, Tristan did have a kid, he just wasn't allowed to see much of her nowadays.

  Bots were anathema to any gaming community. Fairness principles were central, and any suspicion that the game was rigged somehow could be a serious threat to any game company. The gaming industry had spent millions on Capitol Hill to block federal law enforcement's push to get federally controlled bots into the online games. They had failed. So, a good part of intelligence gathering, and even interaction with the community, took place through bots. These were carefully designed bots stuffed with the latest artificial intelligence, which allowed them to convincingly (most of the time) mimic human social interaction. But, sometimes, you just needed to get your hands dirty.

  Dreams of Dad

  Sleep was a mess. My synapses were still firing on overdrive. It was as if I had finally been awoken from my grief-induced cerebral slumber with a Pulp Fiction syringe of pixelated adrenaline right to the brain. In the weeks since my dad’s death, my sleeping life had been working in tandem with my waking life to create a pitch-black nothingness. Every night when I fell asleep, I was sucked into a dreamless void. I guess I should have been thankful not to be wracked by nightmares.

  But that night, after having tried Nick's game, I revisited Alphacore in my sleep. I revisited the prairie, the stream, the mountains, and the forest. Then, suddenly, before me, I saw him. In the distance, on the top of a hill, sitting under a great tree was my dad. He looked out over the fields before him, like I had seen him do hundreds of times before on the sea, the wind through his chestnut hair. I shouted, I waved, I cried, I tried to run to him, but got no closer. He began to fade, to pixelate, and then he was gone.

  My first time in Alphacore, and my strong reaction to it, scared the hell out of me. I had lost control, and I hated losing control. So, when I saw the flickering blue light in Nick's window that next night, I made sure to close the curtains and make myself scarce. Nick seemed to have gotten the message, or maybe I had freaked him out too, and he made himself just as scarce over the next few days. There was one major problem with this avoidance strategy. After that first night, I stopped dreaming again. I missed the dreams. I needed to see my dad again.

  Two more dreamless nights, and I couldn't take it anymore. I sat in my window and waited for Nick to get home from school. As soon as I saw movement in his window, I threw some beads at it.

  "Well, well, what do you know," Nick said with an irritating grin as he pulled open his window. "I was just wondering when you'd come back for more."

  This was not a little embarrassing… groveling did not come naturally. "Yeah, well, I uhh..."

  "Come on over. I was just about to boot up."

  A few minutes later I was in Nick's gaming chair again. The Alphacore logo rotated enticingly on his curved monitor.

  "What you experienced the other day was just the beginning, believe me," Nick said as he leaned over me to type in a few commands. "Today, we're gonna take it to a whole other level. Today, we're gonna teach you how to kill."

  "Oooh, this should be really neat," I said, feigning indifference. But the fact was, I couldn't wait. I put on the headphones, flipped down the visor, and found myself in SoomoBrother again. I moved the mouse and took in a 360-degree view. It wasn't the prairie anymore. It looked more like a post-apocalyptic war zone with smoldering wrecks and cratered mud. Frami
ng it all were the same mountains and moons. It was beautiful in the way abandoned buildings can be beautiful.

  "I was thinking that we start slow and solo. In this mission, it's you against nine others in what we call a limited battle zone. You see that electrical fence over there? That will prevent you from leaving the zone alive. To give you a fighting chance, pardon the pun, I have patched you in through the Brazilian server. They’re mostly newbies over there."

  Thanks for the vote of confidence. I hadn't fired a single shot in Alphacore, yet somehow, I didn't like being labeled a newbie.

  "So, you want me to kill nine Brazilian newbies with freaking cutlery?" I said as I pressed the left mouse button and SoomoBrother slashed with the knife at nothing in particular.

  "Not quite," Nick said as he leaned over me again, his cheek not more than five inches from mine, and pressed some of the number buttons on the keyboard. I was increasingly convinced of his obliviousness to the concept of personal space. Didn't he even see me as a woman and consider the potential ramifications of the closeness? Maybe all I was to him was a black-clad, asexual, basket case. "Press here to toggle between the different weapons. As you can see, apart from the cutlery, you have a shotgun and an AK47." Different weapons appeared in SoomoBrother's hands as I toggled in turn.

  "That'll help. Now kiss these Brazilian bastards goodbye." I readied the AK47 and ducked in behind the nearest wreck. I felt my heart pump fear into my veins.

  It was—I was—a disaster. What did I think, that I had some innate gaming ability that would suddenly make itself known to the world if I just wanted it enough? I was no better than the millions of idiots putting their stupid videos on YouTube or TikTok as they blow things up, or eat hot chilies, slab on makeup and hair products, or dance, expecting effortless stardom and wealth. What a racket that was.