Level Zero Read online

  I select the second message.

  “Your mother would have wanted you to attend.”

  I delete this message even quicker. I don't want to hear about it. I don't want to think about. I don't, and I can't. Not now.

  I open Xen's video mail before I'm lost in thought. The face of his avatar appears on the screen, standing in the middle of a dance club filled with avatars of every shape and size. Music throbs in the background, muffled by the background noise filter. Streams of color wash over Xen's avatar like liquid light. Xen designed himself to look like a bald Tibetan monk, with skin so pale it's almost translucent. His frame looks emaciated, like he's been fasting since the day he was born. He's wearing loose orange wrappings like something out of a martial arts video-cast. He's yelling into the camera.

  “Kade! When you finally quit playing your game, meet me in DotSoc as soon as you can. Please. I'm at a place called Cherub Rock. I need to talk to you. Just... give me a few minutes. That's all I'm asking.”

  His face disappears. The options to reply, delete, or archive the message scroll onto the screen. I press the delete button.

  I sigh, stressed by the drama of the message. I was expecting the usual brief check-in, not some urgent request for me to drive all the way across NextWorld to a dance club I'll only find irritating. I can't ignore him because the system will let him know I've watched his message. I run my hand across my head, trying to push away the feeling. Shooting shotguns into people is so much easier than this. I squirt another mouthful of vitapaste into my mouth and crawl back into my E-Womb.

  I'm not excited to go to DotSoc. It's the most popular domain in NextWorld, a place where avatars from every domain come to socialize and meet new people. The dance clubs might be more interesting than the real communal areas of the towers, where only the oldest citizens choose to congregate, but I've never understood the appeal of gyrating my avatar against the avatar of someone else while deafening music pounds into my ears, and I hand over all my vouchers for liquid downloads that mess with my perceptions.

  Xen would rather find a private chat room to meditate with a special group of people, or debate philosophy in the DotGod domain, but he loves music. It's the only thing he loves as much as his weird religious beliefs, and he'll go to any shady corner of DotSoc in order to hear his favorite bands.

  I try to come up with an excuse, something to send him in a video-message to let him know, “I sure wish I could meet you, but unfortunately...” Except he knows I have no life. He knows there's nothing going on except games, games, and more games. I have nowhere I “have” to be, because for me there is nothing about socializing with other people that feels anywhere near attractive.

  I've known since a young age that there was something different about me, and that difference makes it nearly impossible to relate to other people. Where I see only logic and rationale, others get consumed with emotions and romanticized ideals. I can't understand them, and they can't understand me, so I do us a both a favor and stay away. Yet here I am, about to meet my friend at a club full of dancing avatars who desperately want to talk to each other, because I can't come up with a good enough lie.

  I close the door of my E-Womb and the inside of the sphere illuminates. I hear the hum of the machine. I feel the heat of the electricity wrap around me like a web of static. I curl up in the very center of the sphere, closing my eyes and letting the smallest smile form across my cheeks. I feel embraced.

  My mouth opens, and I speak my two favorite words: “Log on.”

  000011

  My chosen spawn point is in front of the gates to the DangerWar lobby. As soon as my avatar appears, I'm gesturing in the air to open my inventory window. I have a few options for traveling to the DotSoc domain, but the only real choice is my one and only vehicle. High speed teleportation is too expensive. The bandwidth needed to move across domains instantaneously is something the government decided to charge for during the beta testing of NextWorld. They foresaw too many avatars with short attention spans teleporting between random domains, and they knew the servers could never handle the onslaught. Besides, the sale of vehicles is yet another source of income for NextWorld.

  My vehicle started as a trashy, default car from a discount bin in DotCom, but I picked it up in an auction house from someone who just wanted to delete the item from their inventory. It ran with horrendous lag, and its software was threatening to corrupt at any moment. I worked on its code for nearly a year and was forced to use the public transit systems to get between domains until I got it running. But I didn't stop at simply making it work. I cranked out the baud rate so that it could scream through lines of code, chewing up virtual pavement like one of those extinct carnivores. I tweaked the image so that instead of a four-door family carrier, it became one giant wheel with extra knobby tread, and a single seat instead of an axle.

  When I select the wheel, the tiny representation grows, breaking from the confines of my inventory window and landing hard on the ground next to me. I climb up into the seat and lean back, wrapping my hands around the controls. The wheel roars to life, emitting the preselected sound clip I designed: a combination of a jet engine and a prehistoric monster from an old animated video-cast. With a gentle push, the wheel bursts from the domain, tearing into the river of traffic that rushes around DotFun. Most of the vehicles here are newer rides, designed by kids my age, but some are old hand-me-downs from their parents. It's late evening, so the bandwidth is clogged, causing traffic jams near the entrance to the more popular games. My wheel is crawling at only thirty to forty petabytes a second. I pull onto a side street and make my way toward the domain's exit.

  Once I'm outside DotFun, I crank back the throttle, raising my speed to nearly seventy exabytes a second. I get lost in the thousand-lane super-highway that connects all of NextWorld. The road rises above all of the domains, and from my point of view I can see DotCom rolling far below. The nearly hypnotizing flash of blinking advertisements create a psychedelic display of colors and images. Bikini clad nymphs holding virtual items, muscle bound barbarians wearing virtual clothes, and avatar celebrities endorsing their favorite virtual locations. Every ad is selectable, to give me more information and ordering options, even from this distance.

  I pass by hundreds of different vehicles, each one as expressive of the user as their avatar. Most users choose to drive something modeled after real world vehicles from a bygone era: Convertibles, sport utility vehicles, roadsters, and chopper style motorcycles. But then there are the more creative drivers, those with either enough money to hire a vehicle designer, or the education to build one themselves. These lucky individuals can travel NextWorld in anything from a mechanical spider, to a rocket-powered elephant on roller skates. Some users can afford flying vehicles, which are able to take advantage of their own data streams, bypassing the conventional paths that the middle class is forced to use.

  I see a few of these fliers above the highway amongst the NPC birds. They're nothing but tiny black dots against the default, cloudless blue sky that has become the signature look of NextWorld. even at night. Inside the domains there are endless choices of environments, but out here in the connecting lanes, Global President Xiong Chang is the painter.

  Past the birds, thousands of virtual feet above the surface of NextWorld, I see the metallic sheen of the DotGov domain, with its single red flashing light. It looks tiny from this distance, but I'm well aware of the true, massive size of the steel-plated globe that hangs in the air.

  The traffic begins to slow when I reach the center of DotCom. The congestion is eating up the bandwidth and everyone's vehicles slow down. It takes me almost fifteen minutes to finally arrive in DotSoc. Once I roll down the exit ramp, I make a left toward the club scene of the domain. DotSoc offers lots of socializing experiences. From art museums, to gondola rides in re-creations of Old Europe. From beaches on the surface of alien planets, to hot air balloon rides underwater. I plug in the name of the club: “Cherub Rock,” and let the guidanc
e system direct me through the domain. I glance down at the club's description in my window.

  CHERUB ROCK

  An angelic experience for NextWorld citizens, creating an atmosphere of transcendence for you to center your inner chi and reach the next level of true virtual enlightenment in the safety of a non-PvP environment.

  Tonight Only: The Fallen Sixwings will be ripping through their greatest Thrash-Mandala hits for your ears and soul to feel with our state-of-the-art audio-cast!

  I'm not surprised by any of this. The neo-age religious nonsense sounds like exactly the kind of thing Xen would be into. He was raised as an Omniversalist, and his parents were quite strict about their son's beliefs. But Xen never rebelled against the church. He embraces the teachings of the all-encompassing church and never shuts up about it. It affects everything about him. The way his avatar looks. The way he talks to people. Even the voice he uses to talk to people. Most kids from his part of the world use a slang-soaked version of Nu-Chinese, but Xen speaks with something much more proper and stilted, which is usually just him repeating verses from the Omniversalism guidebook. Sometimes it feels like talking to a badly programmed NPC.

  Cherub Rock's lack of player vs. player attacks isn't surprising either. More than eighty percent of NextWorld isn't zoned for PvP violence. Most people don't want to be suddenly respawned across NextWorld just because some juvenile delinquent got bored and decided to lop off their avatar's head with a battleaxe. Something like that is annoying, frustrating, and can seriously ruin a decent business meeting. But some people get off on PvP. Some people love the constant danger, the nervous twitches of anxiety, and the ability to show everyone else how tough their avatar is. Of course, unless you're in DotFun, and specifically in a game that allows levels for your avatar, no one is any “faster” or “stronger” than anyone else. Regardless, people like to flex whatever they can.

  000100

  My wheel churns down the darkened streets, enveloped in the eternal nighttime of the club scene in this area of DotSoc. A dizzying assortment of structures line the streets, spreading into the skies in a thousand different directions. I pass crowds of avatars in queue for concerts and bars, waiting for their chance to enter. No one pays attention to each other, gesturing within the system windows that are invisible to everyone else, lost in chat screens with absent avatars. I pass by on the street unnoticed.

  I pull in front of “Cherub Rock,” the NextWorld positioning system on my wheel blinking green as it recognizes my arrival. The dance club is modeled after an old Catholic cathedral floating on a billowing cloud of white puffiness, with animated stained glass windows running up the steeples. The sky around the church is swarmed by tiny, baby angels. Every few seconds they spray out handfuls of glitter onto the avatars waiting in the queue below.

  After I stop the engine, I push the button labeled “INV” on the wheel's controls, and the vehicle shrinks back into my inventory window. I straighten my swirling trench coat, adjust the wide brim of my cowboy hat, and step toward the bouncer. He looks like a caveman, with shoulders nearly three times as wide as my own. His arms reach the ground, knuckles resting on the sidewalk below him. The only thing not prehistoric about him is the tuxedo he's wearing. The blank stare in his eyes lets me know he's an NPC.

  “Whatchyo name?” he asks, an unmoving wall of a muscle that blocks the doorway completely.

  “Arkade,” I say, tipping my hat.

  A clipboard appears in his hand, and I roll my eyes at the lazy coding. He should have been holding it this whole time, or he could have pulled it from his suit jacket, but instead the programmer took a shortcut.

  “Yur on da list,” he says, and steps to the side.

  I smile and try to ignore the line of glitter-covered avatars that groan with an impatient annoyance as they continue their wait. Every one of them has an avatar designed with minimal original designs. Most of them are right off the rack, with a slight change in hair color or a single piece of paid clothing. A few of them have original designs, but even they are uncreative and dull. I roll my eyes at them without realizing I'm playing the part of the snobby club goer.

  When I pass through the front doors, the moderately sized cathedral opens into a gigantic space that defies the laws of physics. The inside is bigger than the outside, a common trick with digital real estate developers. A stage floats above the center of the dance floor, holding the band so that they can see over the entire club. The singer's avatar has three heads, each singing into their own microphone, harmonizing perfectly. The drummer has eight arms. The third member has a rhythm guitar for her left arm, and a bass guitar for her right, both of them shooting lightning out of the neck, striking one of the random avatars that are dancing on every inch of floor, wall, and ceiling.

  The gyrating horde is throbbing like one complete living entity with a thousand different heads. Each one has a tiny, selectable icon floating over them, which would give me access to their public profile, telling me everything from whether or not they were single, to what their favorite video-casts are, to pictures of their virtual pets. It makes meeting people easier, but it also makes it more apparent how few people I want to get to know. My own icon is locked down. Anyone selecting it gets a blank page.

  The liquid light I saw in Xen's video-cast is still active, washing over everyone and leaving a rainbow effect that drips off their bodies. Lights flash to the beat of the music, and the speed of the strobe effect is making me sick. Thankfully, the temperature of the club is kept at a perfect degree for every avatar. The more you dance, the cooler it gets and the more comfortable you become.

  I step past an NPC waiter as an avatar shatters a bottle of virtual beer over his head. A few avatars scream, but a few avatars applaud the reaction, and then return to their conversations. I'm not shocked by the virtual violence. I've seen worse and far more often in DotFun. Just because there's no PvP actions allowed, doesn't mean you can't have some fun with the virtual intelligence of the NPCs. That's allowed almost everywhere.

  As I make my way toward the edge of the dance floor to look for Xen, I pass through the section of the club filled with tables. Groups of avatars huddle around them. It's easy to section off the cliques when they group together, their individuality becoming less apparent when surrounded by near mirror-images of themselves.

  As I'm thinking about the fact that even in DotSoc I prefer to play solo, Xen comes bursting through a group of scantily clad cat people.

  “Kade! Finally!”

  He's screaming it into my ear as his frail arms scoop me up, lifting me off the floor—an action that wouldn't normally be allowed in a non-PvP environment. There must be special exceptions written into the club's coding. When I look around the club and see numerous avatars rubbing against each other on the dance floor, I understand the need for the rule.

  When he sets me down, I motion toward the bar, uncomfortable in the center of the dancing mass. He nods, and I follow his kung fu monk avatar toward the crowd swarming around the bartenders. Xen's arms separate the avatars, creating a walkway for me behind him that no one argues with. Xen is known here. Known and respected.

  When a golden-skinned NPC bartender approaches him, Xen looks back at me and asks me something, but I can't hear him. He makes a motion like he's drinking something, then lifts his hands as if to question me. I figure out his game of charades and shrug as if to say, “Whatever.”

  He grins at me, but it looks sneaky. He says something to the shiny bartender, who summons two billowing white drinks. Xen grabs both cups, letting the bartender deduct the price from his digital account of real world credit. He hands one of the cups to me.

  I'm only fifteen in the real world. I'm still allowed access to virtual drinks and drugs in NextWorld, but until I reach that all important age of sixteen, there is a government imposed filter on the items I consume that negates their effect. Another archaic rule. Why should my actions in NextWorld be restricted by how many years I've existed in the real world? I can f
eel the smoke I inhale entering my lungs, the pills going down my throat, and I can taste drinks that I swallow, but nothing has any kind of effect on my mind. I don't want to mess up my perceptions, but it still bothers me that the decision isn't mine.

  Xen has been sixteen for three months now, but I know he keeps his filter on as well. His Omniversalist teachings require him to remain sober at all times. It makes the expense of the drinks even more of a waste, but since his parents pay for all of his NextWorld transactions, it doesn't bother him. My father could easily afford this, but he tells me that living off of student vouchers will encourage me to study harder and get a good job, because I'll know what it's like to live amongst the poverty class of NextWorld citizens.

  I think he's just cheap.

  Two stock avatars are standing next to us, draining large glasses of something and high-fiving each other. They both roar into the air, then throw their glasses at the bartender. The glasses shatter against the NPC's head, but no one notices. The two avatars laugh.

  Xen looks disgusted, and I'm afraid he's about to start trouble. I've listened to his speeches enough times to know part of his religion—as ridiculous as it sounds—is treating all avatars, players and NPCs alike, with equal respect.

  I grab his shoulder and say, “Let it go.”

  He replies, but the music is reaching its peak, with grinding noises and drumbeats so fast there's barely a difference between each note. They all meld into each other.

  “I can't hear you,” I yell back, and select the subtitle option. “What did you say?”

  He shakes his head and shouts, “I can not hear you. Private chat room?”