months, and then nothing. No stabbed or strangled avatars discarded in the alleys or in the back rooms of bars or in dirty Lincoln Avenue motel rooms. Justin hadn’t played the game at all in two months except to check in on his avatar and to celebrate his Shadow mother’s birthday.
Tuesday morning, dressed for school in jeans and a black T-shirt, he poured dry cereal in a bowl and pawed through the mess of bills and home magazines and catalogs on the kitchen counter.
“What are you looking for, hon?” Martha asked.
“The paper,” Justin mumbled.
“The Tempo section is on the table there,” she said.
Justin kept shoving aside piles of old paper. “Nuh-uh. The front page.”
Martha sighed. “You shouldn’t read this stuff. You get so worked up.” She opened a baseboard cabinet where she kept the big pots and removed the folded Tribune section. “But I guess I can’t keep it from you. The radio, the television, the Internet. God knows what you talk about in school.”
Justin sat down and flattened the paper on the table. The headline read: DAMEN AVENUE DEATH
Cops say woman, 23, could be first Wicker Man victim in six months
Justin read the story quickly. She was found behind a French restaurant. Strangled and stabbed. Raped. Body left in the rain. No prints, no DNA. Police guessed time of death was between 2 and 4 a.m. Justin agreed: it was the Wicker Man, all right.
The story continued with as many details about the victim as they could gather. She was from downstate. A student at DePaul. She had eaten at the restaurant with friends earlier in the evening. None of them were considered suspects. Not much more than that. This edition had been distributed electronically (and printed directly in the homes of subscribers on large-format paper), but the reporter still would have had only an hour or so to file the story.
At the end of the article was an editorial note in italics: “Sally Barwick helped with the reporting on this story.”
Hunh.
He put on his coat and kissed his mother good-bye. “Finish your cereal, you have time,” she said.
“Gotta be in early today,” he told her as the kitchen door shut behind him. “There’s a science lab I need to finish before class.”
Martha sighed. She felt certain that was a lie.
When he’d gone three blocks on his bike, Justin turned right where he should have turned left and circled back to Stone Avenue. The last few mornings he worried he had been looking at the wrong window. What if Dr. Moore had left him the signal days or weeks ago and he’d missed it somehow? He paused his bike a few houses down and scanned every upstairs window, eight of them across the face of the large Prairie home. In the upper- right quadrant, underneath a flat, protruding eave, there was a window separated into eight panes. A piece of white paper had been taped inside the bottom left pane and the curtains behind it had been pulled shut.
Justin picked his feet off the ground and propelled himself forward. Finally. The waiting had been horrible. With no word from Dr. Moore and nothing going on in Shadow World, his life for the last few weeks had been practically suspended.
He endured his morning classes – English, calculus, history – and rushed across the main building to get to fourth-period computer science early. He was only the sixth person to arrive. Now he just had to remember which boxes were still live with the game.
Shadow World had become so popular that Northwood East (and hundreds of other schools across the country) had to ban students from playing it during school hours. It was too big a distraction. Teachers tried to be diligent about deleting the software from hard drives and networks on campus, but the kids wanted to play more than the teachers wanted to stop them, and Justin could almost always find a machine with an undetected installation. He sat in the back left seat and searched the computer there. Nothing. He slid over to the next chair and tried again. This time he found it in a hidden folder, nested deep in the directory and renamed “HISTOR~.” An indifferent teacher conducting a half-assed search would never have found it.
The students were mostly in their seats now. They were supposed to be working on independent programming projects, so their teacher, Mrs. Biden (too old to know how to do anything useful on a computer, the students all agreed), made a few brief announcements and then urged them to work quietly, as she always did. Justin had already finished his assignment, or nearly anyway, and he called it up on the screen so he could switch to it in a keystroke if someone walked behind him. Then he logged on.
The game downloaded the time from a government lab, consulted his schedule, and figured out he should be in this classroom. Fourth period was an hour long, followed by lunch, which was also an hour. He had a forty-minute study hall for sixth period and had already put in a request to spend his free period here in the computer room. That meant he had two and a half hours. He hoped it would be enough.
Typing every word he wanted his avatar to speak (at school he couldn’t use the headset or the teachers would bust him in a second), Shadow Justin told his Shadow teacher he wasn’t feeling well, and she excused him to the nurse’s office. His avatar ducked out the doors by the gym and took a shortcut through the woods toward downtown Northwood, jogging along a path of mud and dead grass. An early snow had covered the ground a week before but it had melted from even moderately traveled places and the game reflected the messy result even along this out-of-the-way trail. He couldn’t risk getting his bike from the rack. Someone in the game would see him. Looking around the room he guessed there were three others playing at the same time, and their online alter egos were no doubt skipping out on school as well.
In fifteen minutes he was on a train headed into the city. Other suburbs rolled past as the light midday ridership boarded and disembarked. At Northwestern station he got off the train and passed an arcade on Washington. He wondered what it would be like to go inside and play a coin-operated video game through his computer. Some other day.
Speed was the thing, so Justin hailed a cab and took it to Tribune Tower, just north of the Chicago River. The sidewalk in front of the Gothic stone building on the east side of Michigan Avenue was active with reporters and other workers from the paper returning from the field or heading out to lunch. Twin revolving doors, framed in glass and wood and set inside the elaborately carved stone edifice, sucked men and women into the building at the same rate they pushed them out.
The lobby was several stories high and the walls lined with a variety of reflective stones. A security guard sat at a marble half-moon desk, checking people as they came in. Two banks of elevators were behind them, and over the elevators was an engraved quote from Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the first publisher of the Tribune.
“Guard, I’m here to see Sally Barwick,” Justin typed when he came to the front of the short line. “She’s expecting me.” That was a lie.
“Your name?” the guard asked.
“Justin Finn.”
The guard touched a directory screen in front of him. “Sally Barwick. She’s on the fourth floor. Let me call up and see if she can come get you.” He appeared to be listening to the phone ring over the handset, and he waved Justin aside so he could help the next person. If Sally wasn’t playing the game at the moment, he would no doubt tell Justin to come back later. No good.
The elevator dinged and a half dozen people stepped off while a crowd of avatars pushed forward, preparing to squeeze in. Shadow Justin quietly joined them and the back of the guard’s head was pinched away by the closing elevator doors.
It took only a few minutes of navigating the paths between cubicles up and down the fourth-floor newsroom to find Sally’s desk. Her avatar was typing diligently at her keyboard, working on a story.
“Sally?” Justin said.
Shadow Sally looked up. She didn’t appear to recognize him. “I’m sorry. I’m very busy. Perhaps you can come back later and we can talk.” A programmed response. Weird.
If she was signed out of the game, her avatar should have been gray and lethargic. When a person was logged off, the player’s avatar went on auto-pilot, performing typical functions in a robotic torpor. If, in Shadow World, the person had a job in a cotton-ball factory, the avatar would continue to make cotton balls in the player’s absence. A player could leave simple instructions – take the five-fifteen train, make a TV dinner, go to bed at eleven – and until the player returned to the game, the avatar would have minimal contact with other players. It would even turn a washed-out blue color so others would know that interaction was discouraged. Sally’s avatar had a
