Slum Online (25 page)

The question I needed to grapple with first was not the thief ’s identity, but why they would bother sending the trophy to Tetsuo’s player. I did not think it was an entirely meaningless act. Nor would all this end were he to simply return the trophy to Pak.

The most obvious reason I could think of was that someone with an axe to grind with Tetsuo was trying to frame him. But if that were the case, I would have expected the thief to be spreading rumors already. I had checked my logs and no one suspected Tetsuo of any wrongdoing. So that line of reasoning was probably a dead end. I crossed it off my mental checklist.

Just about anyone who had spent time in Sanchōme knew that Tetsuo had defeated Ganker Jack. That didn’t necessarily make him the toughest guy in Versus Town, though some might credit him with that title anyway. Others held that only the top-ranked player in the tournament was the best. Maybe it was this odd disparity of opinion that had inspired our thief to take action. Maybe he (or she) was trying to start a fight between the two champs of
VT
.

I waded through the sea of information, a can of cola (bought for me by my parents) in one hand. Many people seem to think that shut-ins sit around eating pizza all day, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Appetite is a sign that one still possesses RL aspirations. A true shut-in never exercises, so hunger is never really a problem. Their muscles atrophy, they grown thin. I rarely eat at all. The only thing accumulating inside me was the information that came rolling in from the net like waves from the sea.

I decided to start by making contact with those who had joined in the hunt for Jack, and then looked into finding out more about this
Versus Town
arcade event. At the same time, I began my analysis of my conversation log, focusing on tournament contestants and Sanchōme residents. First I sorted their conversations by category. Then I divided the conversations by player name and ran searches for keywords. Finally I looked at connections with other characters based on those words and plotted all the connections on a grid. It might have seemed like a fairly elaborate process, but with the help of some freeware applications off the net, I hardly had to do a thing.

At the center of my grid was, of course, Pak. Next to him was Tetsuo. Everyone around them had ranked highly in the second season tournament. Tanaka—by all accounts a jock—and the nameless snake boxer were way off to one edge of the grid. But there was another person near the middle, forming a triangle with Tetsuo and Pak: the snake boxer Ricky. Not a weak fighter by any means, but not the strongest combatant.

Though it made perfect sense for Ricky—whose devotion to Pak and open dislike of Tetsuo were both well known—to be at the center of the rumors circulating about the trophy snatching, something about it didn’t quite fit. That Ricky was despicable was a fact. But trying to frame Tetsuo’s player just didn’t fit with what Hashimoto knew of Ricky’s free-form fighting style. Freestyle fighting still means fighting by the rules. And theft was certainly not in the rules. Maybe it made more sense to suspect someone far from the center of the grid. The real thief might have taken steps to avoid any rumors. And I had to admit the possibility that Tetsuo’s player was simply pulling my leg. Maybe he had even stolen the trophy himself.

“Anyone can come up with theories. What you need is a plan.”

No wiser words have ever been spoken—of that I have no doubt. And that’s not a quote from some historic figure or famous scholar. The lead character in a manga I once read had said it.

As long as you’re online, it’s easy to find a solution to just about any of life’s little problems. Dr. Google had a way of coming up with answers for every question. The real impediment to solving a problem was
understanding
what you learned from the Internet, then putting it into practice. You might know the commands for a killer move, but if your fingers can’t convert knowledge to action you’d never win a match. It was the same thing in RL, and though we might have the knowledge we need to solve a real world problem, it’s never easy to know how to act and when. This little incident that had occurred in the narrow space between
Versus Town
and RL was going to be one of those kinds of problems, I could tell.

For the time being, I decided to narrow my investigation to Ricky, Tanaka, and the nameless snake boxer. In the case of Ricky, a regular at the JTS Saloon, I would have Masumi collect log data for me. Unfortunately, because of my promise to Tetsuo, I couldn’t enlist all the people I would’ve liked to for a real sea-of-people web crawler strategy. Instead, I sent Hashimoto to the arena in Nichōme on his own.

The arena was the center of Versus Town. A recent server-side upgrade had made a new combo attack possible, and the place was packed with people logged in from all over the country to try it out. It had recently become fashionable to use a skinning mod to make one’s character look like some character from a manga or anime. I spotted several people in a group who all looked like this chick from a late-night anime I’d seen once. That is, their faces all looked like hers, but their bodies were those of their original characters. They were in a circle, trying out new moves. I could hear the smacking sound FX of successful counters all around, making the place sound like a concert where the orchestra was made up entirely of bass drums and cymbals.

It would be enough to linger by one wall in order to gather log data. I decided to go in undercover, changing Hashimoto’s clothes to those worn by that same late-night anime chick. His face I left the same, which probably had the opposite eff ect of attracting more attention.

Just past four
AM
, when most of the place was full of characters standing idle aft er their players had dozed off or gone AFK, someone approached Hashimoto.

> Nice face. lol

> Alas, I could not bring myself to disguise my trademark features.

> I’m totally screen-capping this.

> Please! No likenesses of my face!

> But, dude, it’s so funny!

My assailant was also wearing a late-night anime costume, with a long staff strapped uselessly to his back. I recognized him as one of the people who had helped in the hunt for Jack. I had no idea who the player was. Turning to him, I typed:

> Though I realize it may not appear so, I am, in fact, undercover on an investigation. What is it you want of me?

> I just wanted to tell you that I figured it out.

> Figured what out?

> That thing you were asking about. lol. You know, that arcade thing?

> Do tell.

> A month ago there was this local tournament at an arcade in Sugamo. Well, one of the guys who works there happens to be a friend of mine, and he’s not the brightest kid on the block when it comes to information control. Turns out he left a notebook with the addresses of all the contestants out on a counter. lol! Talk about epic fail.

> Who were the contestants?

> Well, the winner was a karateka, most likely Tetsuo’s player. Second place was this elementary school kid playing a snake boxer. People were saying it was Jack.

> The style of snake boxer who came in a strong fourth in the tournament resembles that of Jack.

> Well, yeah, there’s no way to be sure who’s who. But some people were saying that Ricky’s player and Tanaka’s player were there too.

> More and more intriguing.

> Totally. So what’s all this got to do with the missing trophy?

> Sorry, but I am not yet at liberty to say.

> lol. Stingy-ass.

That some confidential information had slipped out into the open was no surprise. The players of
Versus Town
were simply average people who happen to be very good at fighting games, not Cyber Czars obsessed with data security. However, my informant’s story had revealed to me the fascinating fact that everyone I had considered up until now in my investigation had likely been together in one place, and any one of them could have had access to Tetsuo’s address. Judging from what I knew of Tetsuo’s player, he wasn’t the sort to announce who he was to the crowd, but a powerful combatant such as he would reveal himself before long through his game play. Someone could have identified him and made their move.

> I upped a picture I took of the notebook with my cell phone to the usual spot. It’s got personal info all over it, so erase it once you’ve DL’d, k?

> I thank you. I promise that once my investigation is complete, I will tell you all I am able to, so long as it does not infringe upon anyone else’s privacy.

> You’d better for all the help I’ve given you. lol

The anime chick walked away.

The players in this grand scheme were all coming together. Still, I had no idea who had done it or why. I sat there awhile turning it over in my head, when I noticed sunlight spilling in from behind the cardboard on the window. I took a sip of warm cola. The early morning arena was empty. The back of my eyes burned. I logged out and went to the kitchen downstairs to get something to eat.

As I sat at the table in the gradually brightening room, eating for breakfast what my mom had left me for dinner, I surfed the net on my laptop. The morning sun was gleaming brightly off the neighbor’s roof. The blue tiles shimmered, making it hard to read the screen. The light at this time of day always depressed me.

“Hey, you’re up.” The living room door opened. My mother was standing there, looking at me in surprise. “Morning, Jun. Didn’t expect to find you here this early.”

I drained a cup of reheated soup and didn’t answer. My mother didn’t seem to mind. She stomped back into the living room and opened the windows, then the storm shutters, letting in fresh air along with a ray of sunlight that stabbed the dim room like a sword. The screen was all but illegible now.

“My, they’re early this year,” my mother said.

I looked around and saw something brown moving on the single tree behind our house. The tree was a thin-limbed chestnut growing on the tiny patch of ground next to a storage shed. I suspected it was malnourished because it never grew any bigger, and it certainly never produced any chestnuts. A bird that looked something like an obese sparrow sat on one of the branches and failed to hide beneath a freshly sprouted leaf. The bird shift ed on its perch, trying to avoid the combo attack of the branches and the thorny leaves around it.

“That a sparrow?”

“No, silly. It’s a thrush.”

My mother laughed. The thrush launched from its perch, disappearing into the sky over the waking town. It had all happened in a matter of seconds. I turned my attention back to the screen.

I downloaded the image of the address book and passed my eyes over it. In all honesty, I couldn’t care less about Tetsuo’s player. What interested me was this situation where several other players had access to his address. The information trickled slowly through my sleep-deprived head. But when I saw the name of the one man registered as a karateka, I nearly fell out of my seat. It was the name of the only friend I had made during my few months at university.

CHAPTER 3

IT WAS STRANGE reuniting online with someone from RL.

Etsuro Sakagami—the one friend I had made at university. I had no delusions that our friendship had been anything but one-sided. He had kept on keeping on as a student aft er I’d flown the coop, aft er all, and from Tetsuo’s conversational logs it looked like while I’d been frozen in time up in Hokkaido he’d gotten himself a girlfriend. It would be arrogant to assume he was even the same person anymore.

To be perfectly honest, I was a little envious.

Here was a guy who had made it both in the virtual world of
Versus Town
, with his victory over Ganker Jack, and in the real world at the
same time.
It almost seemed unfair for someone who still maintained ties to RL to have a trophy like Jack on his shelf.

Life isn’t fair
. My parents’ words. The words of every parent in the world.

I knew that. I also knew that Tetsuo had been the perfect fighter to take down Jack. He was the kind of guy capable of abandoning the arena in favor of settling things on the streets of Sanchōme. What would it have meant if Hashimoto had done the honors? Little, probably. Still, I couldn’t help but feel that Tetsuo’s actions had a concrete meaning, while Hashimoto’s drifted like mist, indiscriminate and unfathomable, even to me.

I had remained standing still while the distance between us grew. The same distance that had been growing between me and an indeterminate number of people in RL, of course, but now that I knew Tetsuo was Etsuro I couldn’t help but compare my lack of progress specifically with his successes.

I had gone home and he had
let
me. What would have happened had he extended a friendly hand at just the right moment? Nothing, I knew. Everything that had happened to me in RL was my fault. My problems were mine to solve, not his—which begged the question: why help him now?

I returned to my room—ignoring my mother’s editorial comments behind me—and once again entered the online world of Sanchōme, a ghost town in these early morning hours. I moved Hashimoto mechanically down the streets, checking each structure in turn as though I might find something hidden within their pixels.