Level Zero Read online

  LEVEL ZERO

  by Jaron Lee Knuth

  Also by Jaron Lee Knuth

  After Life

  Fixing Sam

  Demigod

  The Infinite Life of Emily Crane

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © by Jaron Lee Knuth

  First Edition 2011

  Second Edition 2012

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons

  Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike

  3.0 Unported License

  Table of Contents

  000001

  000010

  000011

  000100

  000101

  000110

  000111

  001000

  001001

  001010

  001011

  001100

  001101

  001110

  001111

  010000

  010001

  010010

  010011

  010100

  010101

  010110

  010111

  011000

  011001

  011010

  011011

  011100

  011101

  011110

  011111

  100000

  100001

  100010

  100011

  100100

  100101

  100110

  100111

  101000

  101001

  101010

  101011

  101100

  101101

  About the Author

  “Je pense donc je suis.”

  René Descartes

  000001

  I hate the real world.

  In the real world I'm a pathetic fifteen-year-old with pencil-thin arms that can barely lift my own body and acne-marked skin that hangs on my skeletal frame like a wet sheet. But in the virtual reality of NextWorld my avatar is designed to look like an old-west cowboy named Arkade. I've got a dark tan and a perfect five o'clock shadow covering my square jaw. My arms are muscular. My chest is wide. My eyes are a steel-blue that look out from under my wide-brimmed cowboy hat with a piercing glare.

  NextWorld offers a virtual domain for every kind of person, no matter how unique. There's DotKid for the adolescents and babies that want to play with colorful dinosaurs and run around on rainbow roads. Or DotEdu, where I'm forced by the government to spend at least six hours a day learning about authorized facts. There's DotSoc for avatars to socialize at an infinite number of dance clubs, concerts, and social gatherings for even the most specific of interests. DotCom is full of shopping districts offering all the digital products you might need: clothes, vehicles, or even real estate. But it's also home to a thousand different auction houses and flea markets, selling used digital items of all kinds. DotOrg is a “free” domain designed like an outdoor park. It was originally intended for family reunions, parties, or just a gathering place for the public, but it ended up being an open forum for the disenfranchised to complain about their insignificant troubles. DotNet is supposed to be where the infrastructure of NextWorld exists, but the sewers of this domain are also where the hackers and illegal traders tend to hang out, in abandoned connections that not even the all-seeing, all-knowing DotGov can watch.

  And do I even need to explain what goes on in the shadows of DotXXX?

  The domain I spend all of my time in is DotFun, a poorly named place where all of the online games exists, offering race tracks, flight simulators, combat arenas, role-playing games, puzzle boards, and perfectly replicated sports arenas of every kind. I play them all, but my current favorite is DangerWar, and it's where I spend nearly all of my free time.

  I'm good. I'm really good. It's not like my Player-Character name is in the top ten on the DangerWar scoreboard, but I've got close to one million kills, which just proves how much time I spend logged in. When other players see my avatar coming down a hallway, they might as well wait for the respawn, because death is inevitable.

  Tonight I'm playing the haunted mansion map in DangerWar—one of a hundred different scenarios—and I'm completely crushing the other players. I've already killed fifteen of them, and according to the scoreboard, there's only six left. Most of the players I've seen so far have been stumbling around the map, hoping and praying that the wild swings of their swords and spraying bullets of their guns might manage to kill another player through sheer luck.

  It's an easy night for me.

  Flames crackle in a stone fireplace, filling the haunted mansion's library with an orange glow. Above the mantle, a painting of a decaying man watches my every move. As I step around the books that eerily float across the room from one bookshelf to another, I hear the rattle of gunfire underneath the floorboards mixed with the clanging sounds of a sword fight coming from the room next to me. I check my ammunition and smile when I see plenty of rounds left in my shotgun.

  The gunfire continues below me. It sounds like four different guns. Two groups of players are firing from protected cover and wasting ammo. I hate groups. I always play solo. I've never trusted other players, and I have no time for small talk with some little kid who doesn't even know how to play.

  I press my boot on the floor and feel the weak boards bend under my weight. I reach into the satchel on my hip and dig out one of my plastic explosives. The item is expensive, but if I can take out the four players in the room below me, the price will be well worth it.

  The explosive adheres to the floor with a pink, gummy backing that helps it stick in place. I select a five-second timer and push the green flashing button. As soon as the counter begins, I walk away from the bomb and toward the sounds of the apparent sword fight coming from the next room.

  I step toward the doorway, but a tall man wearing a tightly buttoned suit is holding a silver platter and blocking the entrance. On the plate is a curled up cobra that might have startled me if I hadn't played this map a thousand times before. I recognize the manservant as an NPC (a “Non-Player Character” controlled by the game) so I shove the useless distraction to the side and look inside the room. Two players are swinging metal weapons at each other, taking turns blocking attacks. One of the avatars is designed as a classic ninja wearing a black gi and wielding a katana sword. The other has the body of a demon, complete with horns and a long pointed tail, and he's wielding a a curved scythe. They both turn toward the doorway when they hear the plastic explosive blow up behind me. Four names appear in front of me, a red X scratching over the top of each one to acknowledge my kills.

  “How's it going, noobs?” I ask through my teeth that are clenched together around a single toothpick. “Sorry to stop your dance recital.”

  One shotgun round blasts the ninja straight in the chest. His body shatters into a thousand three-dimensional pixels, tiny cubes that sprinkle against the floor before dissolving into nothingness. The demon jumps to the side, throwing out a swarm of knives in my general direction as I pump another round into the chamber of my shotgun. I barely need to lean my head to the side in order to dodge the spinning blades. They stick into the wall behind me.

  I release another blast from my gun, but it only splinters the wooden bench that the demon dives behind. He pops his head up, trying to lure me into firing again so he can charge me while I reload, but I stand my ground. I sidestep to the right, keeping my back against the wall, circling the room so I can get a better angle on the player.

  As I step around a purple velvet chair and p
lace myself next to the NPC manservant, the demon leaps out, charging me with his scythe held high above his head. I grab the tall NPC and shove him toward the swinging blade. I watch his silver platter fall to the floor as he's cut in half. I lift my shotgun and pull the trigger. The barrel is only inches from the demon's face when the blast disintegrates his body. As his name is crossed out in front of me, I wonder what the death must have looked like from his point of view.

  A booming voice announces, “Winner: Arkade.”

  The haunted mansion melts from my view, leaving my avatar floating in a smokey mist. Multiple flashing windows appear in front of me. I reach out and touch the statistics for the game, and the window enlarges. The Koins awarded to me for winning drop out of the sky, and I hear the satisfying noise of them clanging against each other inside the treasure chest that represents my personal inventory. It isn't much, but the game items I need are inexpensive. I make do with very little.

  If I were a better player, like the top ten, I could make a decent living selling Koins in one of the DotCom auction houses. There are always less experienced players who are willing to spend real world credit on in-game Koins so they can boost their character's inventory, but I'm not interested in real world credit. Whatever the exchange rate is, it isn't enough. As long as the government keeps giving me payment vouchers for being a student, and those vouchers keep my account active, I don't need anything from the real world. The thought of graduation, and the end of those vouchers, makes me cringe.

  I reach out and touch the item shopping window, ready to replenish my stock of ammunition and plastic explosives, but an alarm sounds.

  “Feeding time reminder,” a lovely woman's voice says into my ear.

  I sigh with annoyance, but as soon as I hear the reminder, I feel my stomach growl. Some citizens can afford devices that funnel vitamin paste into their bodies, and siphon any waste they excrete, eliminating any need to log out. It allows them to live inside NextWorld twenty-fours a day. The price for such a device is so astronomical that it's an unrealistic dream for someone who lives solely off student vouchers. But I still dream.

  I gesture for the log out controls and push the large green button that rises from the smokey mist. I feel that familiar static tingle in my brain and close my eyes. When I open them, I'm staring at the illuminated metal inside of my E-Womb.

  000010

  “Wireless connection disengaged from your nanomachines,” the digitized voice says, sounding neither male nor female.

  I rub my eyes with the palm of my hands and let my pupils dilate. The spherical E-Womb opens on the side, letting in the cold air from my room. I struggle to lift my legs out of the door, but I haven't actually used them in nearly six hours. My feet feel numb when they hit the metal grating of the floor. Thankfully the nanomachines swimming inside my body hyper-activate my nerve endings and the feeling returns to my muscles.

  My room is in tower #7395453-2075, which is located in the northern part of Old Russia. It's the same size as every single civilian room in every other tower on the planet. Fifteen square feet.

  When I was younger, I used to live in a larger, family unit. But when my mother died, the government split my father and I into two single units. My father lives in the same tower, but nearly thirty floors above me.

  My E-womb is built into the wall of my unit, with the doorway opening up next to my sink. On the other side of the sink is my toilet, which I sit down on immediately. I lean over to the vitapaste dispenser and stick my finger in the small, silver hole. The red scanner inside of the hole talks to my nanomachines, and I wait for the light to turn green. The dispenser opens, offering me a tube of the gray goo, specifically designed with whatever nutrients my nanomachines say that I'm lacking. My tongue salivates as my toothless gums swish the salty, super-dense calorie paste around in my mouth.

  As I finish on the toilet, a train rumbles past my room, shaking the entire tower. I open the shutters of my single window and turn off the automated sunlight, peering out across the cityscape. Water falls from the sky in large, thick droplets, as it always does. The citizens call it rain, but we all know it's the sewage runoff from the upper levels. From the height of my room, I can't see the ground, but there is no earth to see anymore. The dirt and pavement are completely covered in the cables and wires that make up the network of NextWorld. All I can see from my window are the twinkling lights of a thousand other windows that speckle the outside of the surrounding towers. A web of tubes carrying trains and automated walkways connect the citizens to each other.

  My father was a child during the time of transition. The population had grown to a point where the size of the Earth was no longer capable of containing them all. Stepping outside meant rubbing shoulders with hundreds of other citizens, and people were already choosing lives that allowed them to stay inside the ever-growing heights of the world's towers. People could no longer spread out, so they spread upward.

  As humanity continued to decimate the planet with pollution and constant states of civil warfare, citizens began giving up on the promises that the global government was making. Things were getting worse, and no one wanted to face what tomorrow might bring.

  The introduction of NextWorld is still comically attributed to the genius of one man, then Global Presidential candidate Xiong Chang. While it's obvious his team of programmers and designers were the real creators of NextWorld, Chang took sole credit for the invention that gave humanity the hope it needed.

  “Much like a brightly burning candle, our world has reached the end of its wax. Citizens of Earth, I am here to tell you that I am your candlemaker. NextWorld will give us a place to grow and flourish, where once again our children can play on hilltops of flowing green grass, under a blue, cloudless sky, with the warmth of the sun cheerfully beaming down upon their faces. NextWorld is a place where we can conduct our business, socialize with friends, and do all the things the old world no longer allows, and now we can do it all from the comfort and safety of our tower rooms. NextWorld is mankind's next step, and I'm offering to hold your hand while we make that step, together.”

  The face of NextWorld won the election that year by a landslide. Forty years later, Chang's global government is still running both the real world and NextWorld.

  The healthcare system already required every citizen on the planet to be injected with nanomachines programmed to combat everything from diseases, to the effects of aging. The brilliance of the NextWorld technology relied on using a wireless connection to transmit new signals to those same nanomachines from a device he called an “E-Womb.” The E-Womb reprograms the nanomachines to intercept the signals between our brain and body, altering them so that our perceptions can be changed. The E-Womb can tell our brain what our eyes are seeing, what our skin is feeling, or even what our tongue is tasting. It changes our reality on an internal level.

  When the real world logged on to NextWorld, everything changed. Our economy skyrocketed under the single digital currency. Jobs popped up all over the newly simulated frontier, and the unemployment rate dropped to a thousandth of a percent. Digital items were snatched up by citizens who desperately wanted to reinvent themselves as virtual avatars. This was a culture hungry to redefine itself. Young and old found a corner to call their own, and the infinitely-sized NextWorld offered them endless possibilities. Mankind had hope again in this new existence.

  But sadly, the real world is still required.

  I feel a headache coming on, a headache that only exists in the real world. I'm not sure if it's the fluorescent lighting, or the filtered air, or some sort of mental block, but it never takes long to swell inside my head once I've logged out. I glance at my bed and consider taking a nap, but the screen above the sink is blinking, letting me know I have messages waiting for me.

  Standing in front of the sink, glancing at my frail, naked body in the reflective surface of the screen, I touch the small message icon in the corner with a number three next to it. The screen displays the pending mess
ages: two from my father, whom I haven't spoken to face-to-face in nearly three years, and a third message from my one and only friend, Xen.

  I met Xen when we were little kids and socializing was encouraged in the DotEdu school system. At that age, you didn't need a reason to be friends, you just decided one day that you were. But as we grew up, our lives drifted apart, and now I find our friendship more of a hassle than a reward. We barely talk. We exchange a brief message every week or so, with nothing more than, “How are you? I'm fine,” to tide us over.

  I select my father's messages first, hesitating over the delete option before succumbing to the subconscious parental pressure to open them. They're text messages, something only someone my father's age would send.

  “Hi. It's your biological birthday next week. I know you don't care about these old rituals, but I'd really like it if we could meet in the communal area of our tower. My campaign team wants to hold some kind of celebration for the news-casts. My election is coming up soon. I need this. Don't let me down.”

  I roll my eyes, deleting the message without even considering a reply. The old man is a pretty well-known politician. I've heard he's only twenty-seven chairs underneath Global President Chang himself, which means nothing to me besides the constant harassment from him to “conduct myself like the son of a politician,” whatever that means.

  The birthday party is a joke. He tries to hold onto ideas that only existed before NextWorld. He likes to act like birthdays, religious holidays, and even family dinners are something that still matter, even though we'd just be squirting vitapaste into our mouths during awkward silences. It's all for show. He conducts all of his business in NextWorld. He campaigns in NextWorld. Even my birthday party would be shared with the public via video-cast in NextWorld. My father is more fake in the real world than in NextWorld, where his avatar appears twenty years younger than he actually is.