Game Alive: A Science Fiction Adventure Novel (6 page)

“I haven’t found anything,” Kari assured him. “I even got my dad to double-check everything.”

“Well, probably everything will go smoothly today after the re-compile.” Jake sighed, frustrated by the mystery for which he still had no explanation.

“I hope so,” Kari said. “So…do we want to do the dungeon quest, or the rescue quest today? We had them both open when we logged out last night.”

“Either one,” said Jake, content to leave it up to his friends to pick. “Just so long as there’s not a lot of jumping. How many times did I fall to my death yesterday?”

“I stopped counting after twelve,” said Des with a laugh, his suspicion forgotten. “Why’d you put in so much jumping if you hate it?”

“I used the randomizer for all the terrain outside the major towns. I can always go back later and customize it, but for now it’s all just randomly generated by the program.”

“You don’t know what your own world looks like?” asked Kari incredulously. “Jake, that’s crazy.”

“No way,” said Jake. “This way I get to explore it along with you, instead of just having to be your tour guide. It’s way more fun like that.”

“I can see that,” Des said thoughtfully. “Okay. I vote for the dungeon. Rescuing innocent victims is great and all, but Des the Hand is ready for one of those bulging treasure chests. What do you say?”

Jake and Kari both nodded, chuckling. “Let’s go get some loot!”

Hours later, the three friends stood beside the dead body of an enormous ant deep within a rough stone walled cavern, scrounging through an overflowing treasure chest.

“The red slippers are for me,” Kari announced, laying claim to the pair of brightly colored, thick cloth shoes. “I want this staff as well, since I’m the only one who can use it. Lord Ryden can identify them for me, right?”

“Of course,” Jake told her. The trio had been visiting Ryden’s keep most evenings at the end of their sessions. Myrrordom Keep was positioned very close to the exact center of Xaloria. More than a simple nobleman-slash-shopkeeper NPC, Lord Ryden represented one of the highest-level AI systems in Jake’s imaginary realm. Connected directly into the overarching code for all Xaloria, Ryden could identify any item or creature in the game.

“I’ll take this axe and helm,” Jake went on, selecting his own loot from the bountiful trove. He held the helmet up, studying the shimmery blue glow that seemed to be emitted by the strange metal alloy itself. “Ryden will have to do mine too.”

“Sure, sure,” said Des. “The pair of you take whatever you want and I get what’s left.” He pulled out a faintly glowing bunch of arrows along with a supple, double-curved bow. With his other hand, Des pulled out a wide-banded silver ring set with an exquisitely cut emerald. Slipping the ring over his index finger, Des grinned. “Lucky for you, I happen to like the leftovers.”

“Lucky for
you,
” Kari told him, wrinkling her nose before she turned to Jake. “Let’s get back to Myrrordom now and have Ryden tell us what we’ve got. Maybe my staff will turn out to have special abilities or something.” She held up her newly acquired staff, admiring the slender but unbreakable ironwood shaft with the fist-sized, deep blue sapphire set at the end.

“Oh, not yet,” objected Des, pointing to a branch of the cave system they hadn’t explored before encountering the solitary ant. “Let’s wait until it’s time to log out. We have the whole other half of this cavern to explore.”

“It wouldn’t take long,” insisted Kari. “I can teleport us straight back to the dungeon entrance and from there it’s only a few minutes to the keep.”

“Yeah, and then listen to Lord Ryden for an hour, then walk back down the hill to fight our way through all over again. Your teleport spell only works for getting
out
of dungeons. The monsters will have all respawned. We’d be wasting our time.” Des shook his head. “Come on, let’s just do a little more and then we’ll go.”

“I’m going to Myrrordom,” Kari said stubbornly, crossing her arms over her chest. She glared at the two boys, daring them to try talking her out of it. “You two can come with me or not, I don’t care.”

“Not,” Des retorted at once, just as stubborn. “Jake, what do you say?”

Jake bit his lip, considering. Kari and Des seemed to enjoy being at odds, and were always looking to him to choose sides. He hated being caught in the middle like that.

On the one hand, he wanted to keep exploring the caves. Des was right about the monsters respawning, and he was sure they would find more treasure further along in the caverns. But Ryden had mentioned something to him yesterday evening, something that had troubled Jake ever since. He had almost called off the day’s questing so he could ask the sophisticated NPC about it, but Kari and Des had been so enthusiastic about the caves.

Thinking back, Jake wondered just what Lord Ryden had meant when he spoke of forces from another dimension seeking entrance to Xaloria. It was probably just the set-up for some epic, campaign-length quest. But there had been something very strange about the words Ryden used to describe this unknown menace, and Jake was eager to find out more. Ryden had said he was close to discovering the answer.

Still, whatever it was would still be there tomorrow. Quests couldn’t pursue themselves, and visiting Lord Ryden could wait. “I guess I’ll stick with Des,” he said, reluctant even though it
was
what he wanted to do. “Somebody’s got to watch his back if we run into any more of those ants. A swarm of them would eat him alive.” Jake managed a weak smile, hating to let Kari down.

“Whatever,” she said, spinning away from the two boys to raise her staff in a grand gesture. “See you later, then.” White light flickered and flashed, and Kari vanished.

“Thanks,” Des said to Jake with a grin. “Now let’s go squash some bugs.”

“Jake?”

Looking up from his kiosk, Jake saw Ms. Johns standing over him with a puzzled expression. The rest of the class were smirking to one another, many of them making no effort to disguise their pleasure that the boy genius had been caught not paying attention in class.

“Uhm, I’m sorry,” he apologized hastily. “I didn’t hear the question.”

“We were discussing the Middle Ages,” Ms. Johns reminded him. “I asked whether you felt the Crusaders were noble missionaries or ruthless treasure hunters.”

“Oh.” Jake thought for a moment, then answered slowly. “They were both, in a way. I guess.” He thought back to what he’d read in his Visi-Classroom homework the night before. He was glad he’d read the lesson at least, hard as it had been to concentrate. He’d spent half the night puzzling over Lord Ryden’s cryptic warnings, actually.
Let’s see,
he thought.
The Crusaders.

“They might have gone because they thought they were helping people, bringing them some kind of salvation. But they sure weren’t sorry if they got to keep a bunch of loot while they were at it.”

“An interesting take on it,” Ms. Johns said, nodding with approval. “Not to mention very diplomatic. You might have a future in politics.” As she winked at him, the tone sounded to indicate the end of class. “Tomorrow, we discuss the Spanish Inquisition. Make sure you all read your lesson,” she called as the students bounded up from their kiosks and gathered their materials to leave. Amid the bustle, Ms. Johns fixed Jake with a curious stare. “Stick around for a minute, please, Jake.”

He gathered his things and went to the front of the room to stand at one corner of her desk, carefully avoiding the inquisitive stares of the other students as they filed out of the room. His face was burning. He should have been paying attention!

“Yes, Ms. Johns?” he asked politely when the last of the other students were gone from the room.

She walked over and leaned against the edge of her desk, bringing her eyes down closer to his level. “Jake, you seem awfully distracted today. I’ve gotten used to you being my brightest, most attentive student. Is everything okay?”

Jake’s eyes strayed involuntarily to the empty kiosk where Kari would have been sitting. She didn’t come to school today. He and Des hadn’t seen her again in the VR program after she’d left them, and now this. At first he figured she was just angry with them, and had logged off before they caught up to her at Lord Ryden’s. Even now, he supposed it could be as simple as that. He wouldn’t put it past Kari to pretend she was sick in order to avoid him and Des.

“Uh, yeah,” he said, not wanting to confide in his teacher. “I’m just a little tired today.”

Ms. Johns had seen the brief glance, and she thought she had a pretty good idea what it was about. She eyed Jake speculatively, but decided to let it pass. A tiny, amused smile danced at the edges of her lips despite her decision and she hurriedly stood up and turned away from the young boy.

“Well, you try to get some more rest. I need you to keep my spirits up, you and the other bright kids. Otherwise, I get discouraged.” She smiled warmly and Jake grinned at the praise.

“Okay, I will,” he promised, and turned to leave the room. Ms. Johns watched him go, still smiling with whimsical nostalgia for what it was like to be young and discovering romance for the first time.

Des was waiting for Jake when he got to his locker. “What took you so long?”

“Nothing,” Jake said hurriedly. “I just had to talk to Ms. Johns for a second.”

“Yeah, because you’re the teacher’s pet.” Des elbowed him in the ribs, grinning to show it was all in good fun. Some of the other students were jealous of Jake, but Des had always treated him like a friend. “You give her VR design tips, yeah, and she gives you sweet grades.”

“Shut up. I do not.”

Des shrugged, unaware that this time his good-natured ribbing was getting on Jake’s nerves. “So, we playing Xaloria tonight?”

“What, without Kari?” Jake asked unhappily.

“I’ll vid her when I get home,” said Des, peering curiously at Jake. “Maybe she’s not too sick to play. It might just be a cold or something.”

Jake nodded, thinking that it might also be that Kari didn’t want to speak to the pair of them just now. Des and Kari bickered all the time, but it never seemed to really bother either of them. It bothered Jake, though. He didn’t like the idea of Kari being mad at him.

“If she feels up to it, we can play,” he told Des, not voicing his hidden concerns. “If not, how about we wait so we can all stay the same level. I don’t want to leave her behind.”

“Sure, whatever you want,” Des said easily. “Me, I hope she feels better. I was wrong about Xaloria, Jake. I really can’t wait to find out what happens next.”

Jake smiled in spite of his private worries. “I hope she’s up to it, too,” he said.

When Jake arrived home from school that afternoon, his mother was waiting for him near the door.

“Hello, Jake,” she said.

“Hey, Mom,” he said. His eyes went suspiciously to her dangling earrings, sparkle-sequined black dress, and narrow high heels. “Uhm, what are you doing home so early?”

“Gerald called and asked if I’d like to go out for a special dinner,” his mother told him, sounding almost bubbly. Her eyes shone and her cheeks were flushed. She fiddled nervously with her earrings and checked her appearance in a mirror hanging in the hall. “So I took the afternoon off.”

Jake fought back a weird sense of foreboding at seeing his mother behave this way. A small voice in the back of his head suggested this might be how he acted when Kari was around lately. “Where are you going?” he blurted the question, hoping to silence his own teasing thoughts.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Jake’s mother looked down at him and smiled. “It’s a surprise.” She sounded brighter than usual; it was the same tone she’d used when she told him she’d sold the house they’d lived in with his father, that they were moving to Leiner Hills. It was the voice she used when his whole life was about to turn upside down. Jake didn’t like the sound of it. He felt his stomach clenching into a knot as his mother prattled on, unaware. “I hope wherever it is, they have good shrimp scampi. I’m in the mood for some shrimp.”

Jake turned and fled to his bedroom without answering, slamming the door behind him. Once he was safe within, he stood frozen in the middle of the room. His mother had gone on “Special Dinners” before. They invariably involved some important conversation, and those discussions never failed to make his mother miserable, Jake miserable, or both of them miserable.

No matter what happened, Jake’s life would change again and it was usually for the worse. There wasn’t a thing he could do about it.
So much for the mighty Sir Xend,
he thought.
I’m not a knight, I’m just a kid.
It didn’t matter that he was the smartest kid in his class, or that he could build entire virtual worlds. In this world, he didn’t get a vote; he didn’t get to be an adult, and that was the same as not being a real person. Powerless, he could only wait for his mother to come home from dinner and tell him what had been decided about his life without anyone asking him about it. Jake felt like an NPC in his own life.

He stood glaring at his home kiosk, as if it were somehow the source of all his troubles.

“Well, I’m not doing any stupid homework,” he snapped at the kiosk, which failed to be offended in any way by his outburst. Jake threw his bag onto the bed and stormed back out of the room, heading down the hall to the VR room. He was just about to launch the program but paused, hearing the front door open. Gerald’s voice mingled with his mother’s clicking heels for a moment before the front door closed again. Silence stretched out over the house and Jake breathed a sigh of relief. At least he didn’t have to talk to Gerald right now.

“Resume Xaloria!” he snapped.

Jake materialized in the courtyard of Lord Ryden’s castle keep. Passing the guards without speaking, he headed for the exit. Ryden was a young wizard who had inherited the castle, Myrrordom, only last year (in the game world’s reckoning) after his ailing father’s death. As the new lord, Ryden still kept the garrison of guards his non-magician father had employed. Of course, Lord Ryden had immediately implemented his own magical protections over the palace. He could easily do with a fraction of the men, or even none of them, but he could not bring himself to force the loyal soldiers to unemployment. That was one of the reasons Jake liked Ryden so much, despite the fact that the merchant-wizard-lord was just an NPC. He was a very sophisticated NPC, tied in with the central AI for all Xaloria, and Jake often chatted with him as if the two were old friends.