Lunar day 217
After breakfast
I had expected to find myself on a bizarre virtual planet, fighting some sort of terrifying aliens. The last time I’d jacked into a game with Roddy, I’d been transported to a moon made of broken glass, where I’d battled beings who looked like giant, angry blobs of snot. But this time, I actually found myself on earth. We were in a charming little Italian village, and our enemies appeared to be completely normal humans. Angry and deadly humans, but humans nonetheless. The only odd thing about them was their clothing, which was straight out of the Renaissance: puffy white shirts, leather pants, and floppy feathered hats. Their weapons were simple swords, rather than ray guns or photon blasters. It was so disorienting, it took me a few seconds to get my bearings.
This was a few seconds too long for Roddy. “Don’t just sit there!” he yelled. “Help me kill these guys before they kill us!”
I spun around to find Roddy’s avatar beside me. While real Roddy was short, flabby, and pear-shaped, virtual Roddy appeared to have stepped out of a comic book. He was nearly seven feet tall and every inch of him bulged with muscles. He was also dressed in a puffy shirt and a floppy hat. Normally, Roddy’s avatar wore high-tech body armor, with multiple guns strapped to his chest. Now he looked like a member of a juggling troupe. His only weapon was a sword with an extremely thin blade.
I had never bothered to modify my avatar, so it looked exactly like me—though the game automatically outfitted me. I found myself in medieval clothes and armed with a sword as well. I raised it as one of the enemy attacked, deflecting his blade. Even though the contact was completely imaginary, it felt unsettlingly real. My sensogloves gave me the feeling of our swords clanging together, while speakers embedded in the hologoggles made the sound ring in my ears.
“Why do these guys want to kill us?” I shouted, fending off another attack.
“Because I kissed their cousin!” Roddy shouted back. While I was fighting only one guy, he was taking on three at the same time.
“That’s it?” I ducked to the side of a fruit cart as my opponent lunged at me. He missed me and cleaved a watermelon in half.
“Yeah,” Roddy replied. “They’re Capulets, we’re Montagues, and our families hate each other.”
“Hold on,” I said. “This is Romeo and Juliet?”
“Duh.” Roddy calmly speared one of his opponents through the chest. “You’ve never played it before?”
“I didn’t even know there was a veeyar version of it.”
Roddy looked at me as though I’d just said I’d never drunk water. “How could you not know that? William Shakespeare was one of the world’s greatest game creators.”
“Shakespeare didn’t create games,” I told him. “He was a playwright.”
Roddy laughed disdainfully, like I was an idiot. “Please. I know what I’m talking about. He created a ton of games: Macbeth’s Battle for Scotland, Revenge of Hamlet, Shrew-Tamer . . . I’ve played them all.”
I would have argued the issue, but it would have been pointless. Once Roddy thought he knew something, there was no talking him out of it. Besides, I needed to save my breath. I didn’t have a lot of practice sword-fighting and my opponent was awfully determined to lop my virtual head off. I was deflecting his attacks as well as I could, but they kept coming. I quickly found myself backed against a wall with nowhere to run.
“Die, Montague scum!” the enemy screamed, raising his sword above his head.
At which point, Roddy came to my rescue, slicing him in half. From head to toe. Both halves thudded to the cobblestones in front of me. Thankfully, no blood or internal organs spilled out; Roddy must have had the game’s violence settings set to Teen.
He’d taken care of his opponents in a similar way. The three of them were now in a dozen large pieces scattered about the plaza.
The dead bodies faded away and were replaced by the words EXCEPTIONAL SWORDPLAY! LEVEL ONE HATH BEEN COMPLETED.
“C’mon,” Roddy said, leading me down a narrow alley. “The Capulets are a big family. More of them will be coming for us soon. We have to get to Juliet.”
“So you can marry her?” I asked, trailing after him.
“Marry her?” Roddy’s avatar stuck out his tongue in disgust, which meant that real Roddy had done the same thing. “Dude, she’s only, like, thirteen.”
“I know, but in the play . . .”
“It’s a game, dimbulb. The whole point is just to kiss the girl. She’s crazy beautiful. And then her cousins try to kill you and your family. But if you defeat them all, you get to kiss her again. For, like, thirty whole seconds.”
“You can kiss a virtual girl?”
Virtual Roddy shot me another you’re-an-idiot look. “Yeah. It’s cosmic. And good practice for when Kira and I start making out in real life.”
I shuddered just thinking about this. Roddy truly believed that he was a great catch and the only reason Kira hadn’t succumbed to his charms yet was that her father didn’t want her dating anyone at the moon base. In truth, the reason was that Kira thought Roddy was a weirdo and a creep. Learning that he’d been making out with virtual Shakespeare characters wasn’t going to improve her opinion of him.
We appeared to have settled into an exploration mode in the game, slinking about Verona in search of Juliet while trying to elude angry Capulets. Even though it was completely fake and ridiculous, being on virtual earth felt fantastic. It was easy to imagine I was wandering through one of the thousands of real Italian country towns, breathing fresh air and feeling the sun on my face. Yes, it was only a matter of time before sword-wielding hooligans tried to kill us, but for the moment, it was a welcome break from the dull, sterile surroundings of Moon Base Alpha.
In the lull between attacks, I asked, “Did you do anything to get Patton and Lily angry at you last night?”
Virtual Roddy shot a wary glance at me. “Sort of.”
We came upon a large, open-air market and wove through the maze of stalls and merchants. All around us, imaginary people were selling imaginary cheese, fruit, and goats. “What’d you do?” I asked.
“I was spying on them.”
“Why?”
“Because they were obviously up to no good. I saw them in the gym after dinner, and they looked like they were trying to be all sneaky. . . .”
“Wait a minute. You were in the gym?” We were all supposed to work out in the gym for two hours a day to counter the effects of low gravity on our bodies, but Roddy hadn’t done this in months.
“No,” he corrected. “They were in the gym. I was just passing by. But I could tell they were up to something, so I decided to spy on them.”
I wondered if this was true. I knew that, in addition to being attracted to Kira, Roddy also had a crush on Lily Sjoberg. In fact, Roddy had a crush on pretty much every woman at MBA who wasn’t related to him; he was a year older than me and his body was already surging with hormones. Lily was the girl who grabbed his attention most of all, though. Every time he saw her, his train of thought would immediately derail and he’d stare at her, slack-jawed with puppy love. Chances were, Roddy hadn’t been randomly passing by the gym; he’d probably been lurking around, watching Lily use the exercise equipment. I decided not to call him on this, though. “And? Did you see them do something?”
“I’ll say. After a while, they snuck out of the gym and went into the base control room.”
A virtual fishmonger waved several handfuls of dead eels in my face, trying to sell me the slimy things for breakfast. I ducked around him. “What’d they do in there?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t see.”
“Why not?”
“Because they were inside the office and I was outside it. Duh. I don’t have X-ray vision.”
“You don’t have any idea what they did?”
“Nope. But I’ll bet it was bad.”
“Why?”
“Because when they realized I was spying on them, they came after me.”
I slipped between two oxcarts as they rumbled through the main square. “How’d they realize you were spying on them?”
“I don’t know. I was being as quiet as a ninja. They just sensed my presence somehow. Maybe they’re psychic.”
I was sure that wasn’t the case. Roddy wasn’t exactly a master of stealth. He had probably sneezed or knocked something over and given himself away.
Roddy’s avatar stopped in front of me so suddenly that I almost slammed into his broad backside. He was looking up above the market plaza. I followed his gaze to an enormous mansion, obviously the home of somebody wealthy and powerful. A teenage girl stood on a second-floor balcony, staring off into the distance.
“There she is!” Roddy sighed. “Juliet!”
Since the girl had been designed by a team of programmers who were most likely male, she looked less like a teenager in medieval Verona than a modern-day swimsuit model. She was actually wearing a bikini, even though they wouldn’t be invented for another five hundred years.
“Oh, Romeo, Romeo,” she trilled. “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?”
“I’m right down here!” Roddy yelled, unaware this was the beginning of her famous speech.
Juliet didn’t notice him. She continued speaking to herself, as in the play. “Deny thy father, and refuse thy name; or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, and I’ll no longer be a Capulet.”
Roddy groaned. “Something must be wrong with the language settings on this game. She’s not speaking English.”
“That is English,” I pointed out. “But it’s from a long time ago. She wants you to give up your family to marry her.”
Roddy looked at me curiously. “I thought you’d never played this game.”
“It’s based on a play!” I repeated. “Like, the most famous play ever.”
“ ’Tis but thy name that is my enemy,” Juliet continued. “Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. . . .”
“Ugh,” Roddy muttered. “I have no idea what she’s talking about. C’mon. Let’s see if we can find the door to that mansion.” He started shoving his way through the crowded marketplace again.
I followed him. “What happened after the Sjobergs saw you outside the office?”
“I took off and hid in the greenhouse. They came looking for me but, luckily, they didn’t find me.”
“No,” I said. “They found me. And they thought you and I were working together.”
“I know.” Roddy laughed. It was a weird, high-pitched laugh that sounded bizarre coming from his muscle-bound avatar. “I heard the whole thing.”
“And you didn’t do anything?”
“Like what?”
“Get an adult and tell them what was going on.”
“If I’d done that, they might have seen me.”
“So you just sat there and let them threaten me instead? Even though I was innocent? I almost got my face pounded in because of you.”
“But you didn’t. Instead you nearly sucked Patton’s tonsils out with the Urinator! That was awesome!” Roddy laughed again.
“It’s not funny!” I told him.
“Incoming!” Roddy shouted. He suddenly wasn’t laughing anymore.
An entire horde of angry Italians was charging across the plaza at us. Unlike the relatively normal men who had attacked us before, these guys were all as enormous and muscular as Roddy’s avatar. Instead of mere swords, they carried scimitars as big as I was.
Even though the entire assault wasn’t really happening, it was still scary. I felt real sweat bead on my forehead and prepared to be filleted.
“Time to upgrade my weaponry,” Roddy announced. He opened a leather bag clipped to his belt, revealing several pieces of gold. They vanished as the game accepted the payment, and a suit of futuristic armor instantly appeared on Roddy’s body. In addition, his thin sword suddenly became some sort of bizarre space-age gun.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Photon blaster,” Roddy replied, then fired several bolts of green light from it. A dozen Capulets were instantly vaporized, leaving nothing behind but smoking piles of ash.
I didn’t have any gold, nor did I have any idea how to cash it in and obtain a photon blaster. I could only shake my sword threateningly and hope Roddy wiped out all of our enemies before they reached me.
“What are you doing?” Roddy screamed at me. “I need help here! Don’t you know how to upgrade?”
“There’s no upgrading in Shakespeare!” I shouted back. “There were no photon blasters in Romeo and Juliet!”
“Dash! Troll on your right!” Roddy yelled.
“Troll?” I repeated, then spun around to find that there was, in fact, a troll bearing down on me. I was quite sure there weren’t any trolls in Romeo and Juliet, but obviously the game’s designers didn’t really care about staying true to the story. This one appeared to have wandered in from The Hobbit; it was the size of a garbage truck, it was vomit green, and unfortunately, it was extremely angry. It galumphed across the plaza, wielding a club that looked like an uprooted tree with spikes jutting out of it.
Roddy fired a few photon blasts, but they glanced off the troll harmlessly. It roared loud enough to rattle my brain, then leaped high in the air, club raised, ready to flatten us.
“We’re gonna die!” Roddy cried, and curled into the fetal position.
Something tapped my shoulder.
The troll suddenly froze in midair.
All around us, the Capulet assault team froze as well.
Someone had paused the game.
Whoever had been tapping my shoulder was now shaking me.
I pried the hologoggles off and blinked in the fluorescent lights of the common room. To my right, real Roddy was curled in the fetal position, just like his avatar. He was slowly coming to the realization that the game had been paused as well.
My father was standing next to me. Despite the fact that it had only been fifteen minutes since I’d last seen him, he’d changed dramatically. He was now extremely nervous and worried, so much that it seemed as though he’d aged five years.
“Sorry to interrupt your game,” he said, “but it’s important. Do you have any idea what Nina did after you saw her last night?”
“No,” I said, feeling a little bewildered. It was always hard to adjust back to reality after a veeyar session. Even though my near death-by-troll had been fake, it still felt disturbingly real. “Why?”
“We can’t find her,” Dad told me. “We’ve looked everywhere.”
I stared at him blankly, trying to make sense of this. “You mean, she’s not at Moon Base Alpha?”
“No. She’s completely vanished.”
“How is that possible?” I asked.
Dad shrugged helplessly. “To be honest,” he admitted sadly, “no one has the slightest idea.”