3. Hard-Light Hero, part 3

  They put it in my old room, on my bed. It was a weirdly small device, about the size of a softball. From my perspective, it was just like changing servers. One moment I was in my [Pocket Dimension], getting ready. The next, I was lying in my childhood bed. I sat up and looked around. Then I looked down at myself.

  “Ah cool, I’m all glowy,” I exclaimed, staring at the way my hands gave off a faint pale light from within. “This would be an awesome effect, I gotta tell Tommy that they need to put this in the game as a buff or something.”

  Sitting next to the bed was a change of clothes, which I quickly put on. I hadn’t zoned in naked or anything; I’d been wearing hard-light clothes to begin with. But I wanted to see if I could wear the real clothes as well, and it turns out that I could, and it reduced the whole glow-in-the-dark effect.

  Once dressed, I spent a minute looking around at my old posters and stuff. They hadn’t changed a thing. It was weird, being in a shrine to yourself. Even the pod was still there, the deep-dive pod that I had spent the last six months in completely, without ever logging out once. The place where I had died. The real me, at least.

  I knew that it wasn’t functional any longer, that it had been gutted as EternalRealms ’ parent company had investigated what, exactly, had happened to me. Even if they hadn’t, pediatric deep dive devices no longer connect to the server due to restrictions put in place to keep kids from playing the game until their brains meet a certain threshold in development.

  I had been an exception to that rule. Because of who my uncle was, I had been smuggled into the beta-testing to begin with, but I would have been cut out until I turned fourteen like everyone else had my life-expectancy not taken a sudden turn for the worse. After that diagnosis, my parents managed to get special clearance to have me spend as much time under the time-dilation of the game as possible to “Give him as much of a life as we can.” They were still debating the ethics of using deep-dive technology for end of life care in the wake of what happened to me and, from what Tommy said, were still years away from a solution.

  “It doesn’t work,” A voice came from the hallway, interrupting my thoughts. “Some guys came and ripped it apart after you died. We put the shell back together the way it looked, but the guts are all gone.”

  I grinned. “Hey squirt, you got big!”

  “Ugh, don’t remind me. I’m on a growth spurt right now and I’m hungry all the time. I’m not getting fat, but I’m constantly craving pizza.”

  “Yeah, that’s one nice thing about the digital lifestyle,” I told her. “I get to have fake-pizza every day of the week if I want. And my week is months long, if I want it to be.”

  “Yeah, I know. Thanks for coming. I wasn’t sure you’d want to after-”

  “It was years ago, Paula, and you were grieving. I’m over it, and I want you to be over it too,” I told her. “And it’s not like you’re wrong. Me and the real Luke … we’re not the same. He died. I didn’t. If anything, I was sort of born when he died. I’m not him. I am something, but I’m not your brother who died when he was a kid. I just have a lot of his old memories. So I get it if you don’t want me in your life, I would have felt pretty weird if the-”

  “That’s the thing, Luke, I changed my mind . I know you’re not him, that hasn’t changed. But talking to you, mom says it’s like a way of remembering him, of keeping him in her heart. And I think that’s something I want to try. So I asked Uncle Tommy to invite you to my party, and then he started talking about holograms and stuff, and here you are. You know you’re like a baseball or something under there, right?”

  I chuckled. “Yeah, he showed me the diagrams of the device. I guess that’s cool. Let’s see what this body can do. Wanna go in the back and shoot some hoops?”

  “I play soccer now.”

  “I suck at soccer.”

  “I know.”

  “Ugh. Fine,” I acquiesced, and we went outside.

  “So, who’s body did you scan for that, anyway? I mean, it’s not you, but it looks like you, right? Did some kid do motion studies for them or what?” She asked we began kicking the ball around.

  “It’s a projection on what I would have looked like,” I answered. “You know, aging software. They’re trying to keep it up with real-time, although I might ask them to turn it off when I get to twenty-something.”

  “That would be nice, being able to say ‘Okay, I’m done aging now. I’m not going to grow any older.’ Like Peter Pan or something,” she said, scoring a goal on me. “Meanwhile I’ll probably turn forty and have everything start to sag on me.”

  “I don’t know, I don’t see that being a I’m going to shut up now,” I said. “Except to say you’re turning out pretty gorgeous, little sister. You have a boyfriend yet?”

  “Um, I have a friend who’s a boy that I spend a lot of time with,” she admitted. “We don’t, like, make out or anything. He’s on the football team, and I play soccer, so we run together to keep in shape when it’s the off-season.”

  “That’s cool,” I admitted. “You’re kicking my butt, so you must be pretty good when you’re playing for real.”

  “I’m totally taking it easy on you,” she teased.

  “I believe it.”

  We played for about a half hour before we gave it up, and it was a great time. Normal brother-sister stuff, like we might have done every day if I’d never been diagnosed. If I hadn’t gotten sick. If I hadn’t died. You know, in a different universe. One where my particular genetic defect was discovered in some other kid, instead of me. They say that they can treat it now. If it’s caught early enough.

  “So how’s school going? You’re going to be in, what, ninth grade, right?”

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “And you would have been a senior.”

  “Technically, you know, I have a G.E.D.,” I bragged. “I took an equivalency course, and with [30X] time dilation a possibility for me it didn’t take very long. One of the advantages, I guess.”

  “I actually didn’t know that. I thought you just played the game all of the time.”

  “That one was Mom’s idea, but Dad and Uncle Tommy agreed. So I did it. I still had plenty of time to play. That’s one of the reasons EternalRealms is so great, they have the best time dilation. And it’s even more effective on me, because I don’t fatigue like a biological brain does, so they can crank it up past the safety limits and let me go for way longer at way higher speeds. It’s great for solo-questing, exploring, crafting, and that sort of thing. It’s also why they like to have me on their beta-testing teams.”

  “I did kind of know all of that. Mom and Dad talk to Uncle Tommy about you all the time. About what you’re doing, and about … about what you are. And what you’re not.”

  “You feeling weirded out? We can talk about something else,” I assured her. “I’m not pretending to be-”

  “I know. So look, I was thinking. It’s okay to say no, but I was thinking we should go see his – your grave. You know? It’s not too far, and we’ll be back before my friends show up. I’m not telling them who or what you are, we’re just going to pretend you’re my cousin if that’s cool with you.”

  “Yeah, that’s cool. To both ideas. But what are we going to do about the glow-in-the-dark thing?”

  “You can barely tell in the sunlight. Just hang out outside and if anybody asks tell them they’re crazy.”

  “Good plan, I like it. What’s my name going to be?”

  “How about Simon or something?”

  “Simon OrSomething’s a lame name. But I can’t think of anything better,” I admitted. “I don’t know where I’m buried, so I’ll have to follow you.”

  We made our way to the graveyard on the back of Paula’s bike. It handled both of us just fine, which made sense since the device that I was occupying only weighed ten pounds and the hard light projection was effectively weightless.

  “It feels weird, riding behind you like this,” I admitted along the way. “I mean, I don’t feel anything. No sensory feedback like in the game. I’m just … here, you know? It’s really weird.”

  “Feels like my passenger is too light, otherwise feels normal to me,” she admitted. “Maybe just because you’ve never done it before.”

  “Maybe,” I admitted. “I’ve driven motorcycles, but never ridden bitch.”

  She slapped me for my language, which of course I didn’t feel. Hard light had no pain receptors, so not even the tingle of feedback I was used to in game.

  “So wait, there’s motorcycles? I thought it was dungeons and dragons stuff,” she asked.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “No, sis, it’s everything. I mean, everything. I play in the fantasy lands mostly, and yeah that’s the Tolkien slash DnD slash World of Warcraft zone. But there’s also steampunk and cyberpunk and sci-fi and westerns and just about every other genre you could think of. It is true that more people play the fantasy version than any other, but there’s still millions of people in each server. But then there are millions of people who log in just to play sports!”

  “Sports? I mean, I heard it was good for athletes, but you can actually play sports?” she asked. “I mean, like, refereed matches and everything?”

  “You can even sign up to referee,” I informed her, grinning. “Or you can let an NPC do it. NPC’s can play as part of your team too, or as your opponents. There’s professional athletes out there who use EternalRealms to practice their games. Like, you can be playing with some random guy, just a pickup basketball game that you found listed as [Looking For More]. Suddenly in the middle of the game, one of the guys on the team says ‘Oh hey, by the way, I don’t know if anyone knows me, but I’m Antoine Parks, I play for LA.’ And nobody believes him and gives him shit the rest of the game, but he is really good. Then the next time Antoine Parks gives an interview on ESPN he talks about getting the shit taken out of him for claiming to be Antoine Parks when he plays on EternalRealms and quotes some of the shit-talking that happened to him. And it’s stuff that you said, too. But he doesn’t give his screen name, because that’s just how it works. It’s a real thing that’s happened to people I know.”

  “Parks can shoot free-throws from the opposite court’s free throw line , Luke. Why would people be talking shit about his game in EternalRealms ?” Paula asked.

  “Because he plays ER with a handicap, obviously. He’s not getting payed when he’s in ER, so he cranks the handicap up to maximum and let’s randos beat the crap out of him. Then when he plays for real, he has the experience of everyone else on the court being this extraordinary player and him being just sort of average. That’s why he and all the other pros who play ER are so damn good these days,” I explained. “You could do the same thing with soccer, if you wanted. But don’t start with a handicap. Not until you’re consistently on the winning team, then you slowly start increasing the handicap until you’re at about a fifty-fifty win-loss ratio for the last ten games.”

  “I get enough soccer in real life,” she admitted. “When I was talking about playing your game to Uncle Tommy, it was because I wanted to play with you.”

  My eyes opened wide in surprise, and I almost fell off the bike.

  “Oh,” was all I could manage. “I think I’d like that too.”

  “It’s just, I mean, I know that like three years ago you accidentally broke the game because you were too good at it and stuff, and I was a little nervous that you wouldn’t want to—”

  “Paula I love babysitting noobs. Seriously, it’s one of my top five favorite things to do in the game. There’s beta testing, raiding with my guild, exploring, crafting, and babysitting noobs. I’ll just tell my guild that I want a break from raiding, which they’ll be totally fine with because it opens up another spot for someone trying to get into professional gaming, and then you can have as much of my time as you can handle. Seriously, I don’t have to sleep, so I’ll literally play with you until your safety limits kick in. Then I’ll go farm up stuff to give you so that you don’t have to do it yourself. There’s rules I have to follow about who I can give stuff to and how much, but you’re my sister, so you’re like completely exempt from them.”

  “That’s great. Um, it’s just, well … Some of my friends are talking about playing too, and they know about Uncle Tommy, so when I started saying I was going to start playing after my birthday they all started asking me about getting a discount on the equipment to play with me. But I want to play with you more than them, but I do want to--”

  “I’ll babysit all of you, it’s totally fine,” I assured her. “In fact, this is better. You guys can start your own baby-party and learn to work together from the beginning. How many friends are going to be playing?”

  “Including me there’s six of us,” she explained. “There’s Sam, you remember her, right?”

  “My little sister’s best friend from kindergarten? Yeah, I remember Sam, Paula.”

  “Well, she’s the only one that knows that you’re stuck in the game. Everyone else knows that I had an older brother who got sick and died, but they don’t know the full story, and if it’s okay, I kind of want to keep it that way.”

  “Yeah, I get it. Don’t worry, I don’t really like people knowing what I am either,” I informed her. “So Sam knows, everyone else is to be kept in the dark. I’m totally on board so far.”

  “Okay. So aside from Sam there’s Kevin. He’s my friend who’s a boy who I run with a lot. I don’t know if you’d remember him or not, but he doesn’t live that far from us.”

  “Is he a redhead?” I asked.

  “Yeah! You know him?”

  “I vaguely remember him being in your class is all,” I admitted. “I certainly don’t remember you and Sam teasing each other because you both had a crush on him in second grade.”

  Paula blushed and pushed straight on through. “Aside from him, there’s Sophia, Rick, and Lewis. Rick is on the football team with Kevin, which is why he’s bugging me to help him get a discount. He wants to have access to ER because he thinks it will make him into a starting quarterback. Or something.”

  “It probably won’t make him into something he’s not. If he can’t throw a football now, then practicing in the Realms isn’t going to help much. It might actually make things worse, because the game sometimes compensates for you in ways that reality won’t, and throwing is one of the things that gets compensated unless you turn it off.”

  “He’s a lineman,” Paula admitted. “Kevin plays linebacker. On defense.”

  “I know what a linebacker does, Paula. I’ve played one often enough. There’s sports in ER, remember? And I have nothing but time.”

  “Oh. You just hated football when you were alive,” she reminded me.

  “I hated watching it. I actually kind of liked playing it. With the pain sensitivity turned down, at least, it was pretty fun.” I thought for a moment. “Well, a lineman is basically a tank. It’s the same concept, at least. He just needs to block the enemy from attacking the healer and the ranged DPS. Kevin could do a couple of things, but--”

  “We’re here,” she told me, kicking the kickstand down at the cemetery gates.

  “Oh, right,” I said, and I followed her in to my grave.

  “So, I haven’t actually come here in a while,” she admitted, sitting down in front of my gravestone. It was kind of weird to think that my body – not really my body, but in a way it was – was down beneath both of us. “I used to come once a week after it happened. I felt guilty when I started coming once a month, but my grief counselor and everyone told me that it was healthy and that you – the real Luke and you too – would want me to move on.”

  “And they’re totally right on that,” I confirmed for her. “Honestly, I don’t think either of us wanted you to have taken it as hard as you did.”

  “I lost my brother, Luke. You were a pain in the ass a lot of the time, especially when you used to find garter snakes and put them in my bed or in the bathroom. I hated you for that. But I lost my big brother, and then a few weeks later I get told that he’s trapped in his favorite video game? Yeah, I freaked out. I’m sorry--”

  “Serious, don’t be sorry,” I said, cutting her off. “It was my fault to begin with. I – when it first happened, I didn’t know what had happened. For a while I was getting calls from you guys all of the time, and then all of a sudden they just stopped. Then my guildmates started accusing me of hacking, and so I reached out to Uncle Tommy because I was afraid I was about to lose my account, and he was the one who figured it out and told me that I was … whatever it is that I am, and not the real Luke. That the real Luke was dead, and that’s why nobody was calling me anymore.”

  She was silent for a moment as she let that information sink in. “You really didn’t know?”

  “I don’t know. There was a few minutes, Paula, and I think that’s when it happened. It was really weird. You know how they say that your whole life flashes before your eyes before you die? Well, I think that I felt that happening to the real Luke. I remembered everything, including stuff that I thought I’d forgotten, and stuff that they tell me never happened. That’s kind of interesting, because a lot of those things they say never happened are actually really good memories. Anyway, I didn’t know what was happening, and then the feeling was gone, and I felt like I had before it happened. I told my guild what I’d just felt and one of my friends at the time told me it was just Deja vu and not to worry about it, that it happened to everyone.”

  “And that’s how you died?” she asked. “That’s what the real Luke felt? Just Deja Vu?”

  “I don’t know for sure, Paula. But I like to think so, and so does mom. Just, you know, remembering the good times, and then gone off to heaven or whatever. Mom cried a bit when I told her about that, but it was happy crying because I told her how I wasn’t scared, and how I had friends with me at the time.” I laughed, and it was actually happy laughter. “You know, we – the real Luke and I – We had no idea before then how little time we had left. We should have figured it out with you guys calling us all the time in game, but honestly we just felt a little annoyed that you kept bugging us while we were trying to get stuff done! It never registered to me until after I couldn’t log out anymore that you guys were all saying goodbye.”

  Paula laughed too. And I was glad that she could laugh at some part of it, now. “I remember that, actually. We were all like passing the phone around and had to kept dialing you back because you wanted to go kill giants or something. That was a few days before it actually happened, but the doctors had told us that it was going to be any day now, and that there was no point in logging you out and taking you to the hospital. So mom and dad and uncle Tommy took a vote, and decided to just let you pass away inside the pod.”

  “And if you hadn’t, then I, whatever it is that I am exactly, would probably not exist,” I pointed out.

  “And the real Luke would still be dead,” my sister said sadly.

  “Yeah. Unfortunately, nothing would have changed that,” I agreed. “I’d switch with him if I could, you know that, right?”

  “Don’t say that,” she scolded. “It doesn’t make any sense anyway. According to Uncle Tommy, you only became independent because of the way the buffer and acceleration software interacted with Luke’s brain as he died. You couldn’t switch places with him because he was dying, and you were being born.”

  “I know. I’m just saying. If I could give you your real big brother back, I would have long ago. I’m just all that’s left of him, except for what’s down there,” I said, gesturing down. “I like playing my games and meeting people in EternalRealms and all of that, but real life, the real Luke … I’m just a ghost, Paula. Fuck, I don’t even know what I’m trying to say right now except--”

  “If you don’t know what you’re trying to say then shut up before you say something stupid,” she suggested. “You’re already quite a bit of the way there.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I relented. “Do you mind, if like, I pay my respects for a few minutes or something?”

  “I’ll wait by the bike,” she said, and left me alone at the headstone. I sat down and ran my fingers over the letters and the dates. Twelve years. That’s all he got. Subjectively I was at five times that already.

  “Damn life is unfair,” I muttered.

  ?