My routine is the same every day for the next week. I slide through the school day like a fish underwater, trying not to raise a ripple on the surface. Keep to myself. Face buried in my phone when I’m not in class, an invisible shield between me and everybody else. I see Griggs occasionally as he moves between his different social groups, but we connect less and less during school hours. I think he actually enjoys being around everybody in school. For me, it’s just a clock ticking down until I can get back to my laptop.
I ride the bus home. I get my homework done as quickly as I can. If Dad’s around, there’s some small talk. But he wouldn’t understand that the best part of my day starts after he goes to bed. That’s when I fire up the laptop and visit the virtual Valleytown. Griggs usually shows up for a couple of hours, and we explore. Eventually we come to realize that this mod is a ghost town. There’s never been any sign of other players. Never any sign that whoever made this place has returned to it.
Which is fine by me, because it means I can use the place as my private playground. Tonight we’re playing an epic game of Capture the Flag through the town. My home base is at the FrosT-Queen. I’m holed up behind the drive-through window, pinned down by bone-shaking blasts from Griggs’s radium gun.
“Give it up!” he yells. Green lightning flashes over my head.
“Come and get it!” I yell back. I know that the walls of the FrosT-Queen are indestructible, just like everything else in the mod. I’m safe as long as I stay below the level of the counter. Then something comes flying through the window and rattles to a stop at my feet. It’s a cartoon bomb, a black round ball with a white fuse sticking out the top of it and the word Boom! written on the side.
“Seriously?” I say, just as the bomb detonates. My screen flashes red, and I see a picture of my warfighter splattering into a million pixelated bits.
“You like my secret weapon?” Griggs asks. I tap on my keyboard and respawn my character next to his, standing outside the fast-food restaurant.
“Very classy. You make it yourself?” I say.
“Yeah, I used the mod editor."
“You make anything else in here?”
“Not yet. Want to try?” I grunt yes and call up the mod editor. Half my screen still has the in-game view of my warfighter and the FrosT-Queen. The other half of the screen is filled with green and white letters and numbers. There are options for changing variables within the game, like how hard gravity will pull you down or the position of the sun in the sky. There are also tools for altering the landscape—one that will raise or lower the level of the ground, another that will let you paint surfaces with different textures or colors. I tentatively try a few options on the FrosT-Queen sign. Each click of my mouse is rewarded with the same message.
[Permission denied. Access privileges insufficient.]
I hear Griggs mutter through my headset. “I’m locked out.”
“But you made that bomb,” I say.
“Yeah. But it was my own possession, right? It’s like we can change our own stuff, but not anything in the world around us.”
We spend the next hour trying to see if there are any exceptions to this rule.
Which, it turns out, there aren’t.
“This sucks, man,” says Griggs. “This mod is pretty much abandoned. It’s not like anyone cares about it but us. We should be able to tweak it the way we want.”
“I agree. It’s like salvage rights. You find an abandoned boat, you get to keep it. Same thing. Law of the sea.”
“Law of the sea, huh? You spend way too much time learning useless crap, you know that?” says Griggs. “But I agree. This place is ours now.” He pauses, and I watch his warfighter lob a couple of experimental grenade rounds toward the neon FrosT letters on the sign. As always, when the smoke clears there’s no sign of any damage.
“We need someone with some real skills to unlock this thing. Give us top-level privileges. We need a hacker.” He looks at me, and suddenly I see where this is going. “What about that girl you knew in Chicago? She was into programming, right?”
“She was. Still is, I guess. And no, I’m not talking to her.”
Griggs’s warfighter spins toward me.
“Don’t be such a chicken. You said she’s been texting you. Jane, right? She wants to talk to you. Give her a call and ask for a little favor.”
“You’re totally wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Problem is, Griggs is totally right. Jane is kind of a genius with computers. She had a job with her dad’s tech company as a junior system administrator by the time she was fourteen. If anyone can open up this abandoned piece of software like a can of tuna, it is her.
“I’m going offline. I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say to Griggs.
“Chicken!” I can hear him clucking at me until I tap the key to disconnect from the game.
I slide my headphones off and rub my eyes. Jane. We grew up across the street from each other, started first grade together, always hung out, played video games together as we got older. Then high school and hormones hit, and what had been a good friendship started to edge toward something more. And then I had to move. Another thing that sucked about Valleytown.
I power up my phone and scroll through the contacts. Jane Yu. Screen name—JANEY. Status—online. I tap the Video camera icon, and green letters pop up on the screen. [Video chat initiated.] And then she’s there, looking startled.
“Josh?” She hasn’t changed since I last saw her. Black hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. Smooth almond skin, made pale in the light from her laptop screen. She’s wearing a black T-shirt, no logo, with a plain silver chain looped around her neck.
“I don’t—where have you been?” she says.
“Nowhere. Here,” I say. “It’s been a while.” My fingers drum against my thigh nervously.
“Yeah, it’s been about three months and a hundred text messages. Did your phone break? Or they don’t have cell reception out in the boonies where you are?”
“It’s not like that,” I say. “Anyway, I just thought…” I can’t do this. “Look, I’ll call you back later. I’ve gotta go.”
“Josh, come on.” I can see the concern in her eyes. As pissed as she is with me, Jane wants to talk.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” I mumble.
“Well, you were pretty clear before we left. We would message each other every day, you said.” She fiddles with the silver chain with one hand, twisting and untwisting it.
“And I wanted to,” I say. The words start slowly, then tumble out faster. “But it’s really weird being out here. After the divorce. After the move. There was nothing familiar, nobody to hang out with. It sucks. It really does. And at first I wanted to call you. I wanted to tell you about it. But then…talking to you was just going to be a reminder of how great things were back in Chicago. It was easier just to block you out. Block everyone out. It felt, I dunno, safer.”
Jane stares at me through the screen. “It sounds like a firewall—you know, the software that stands between your computer and the Internet? You put too many holes in the firewall, you expose yourself to all sorts of trouble. But if you block everything out—well, the firewall just becomes a problem. It becomes a prison, not a castle.”
“Janey, I don’t think I explained it right…” I say.
She leans in toward the camera. “Listen, I’m on the other end of the line, right? But you’ve got to let me in. I can’t do it on my own. Call me when you’re ready.” I can see her reaching toward her keyboard to disconnect the call.
“Wait!” I say. “I called you for another reason too. I found this site, this mod of Killswitch. It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before. A total recreation of the town I’m living in. Like, everything. My house, my school. I don’t know how he did it. Must have taken months.”
“Taken who months?” she asks. “Who built it?”
Mysteries and puzzles, preferably related to programming, have always been Jane’s kryptonite. She can’t help asking more questions. I fill her in as best I can about the virtual Valleytown and its weirdness.
“All right,” Jane says eventually. “Text me the details. I’ll check it out with you. I’ll meet you there tomorrow, five o’clock your time.”
“Awesome!” I say, wincing at how eager I sound.
“But be on time,” Jane says. “I’m fully expecting you to bail on me. I’m not going to wait around for you.”