normal complexion, but clearly real Sally wasn’t in control.
Justin typed, “Sally, will you be coming online for lunch?”
“That’s impossible to say,” Shadow Barwick said. “If you would like to leave me a note, I will see it when I am less busy.”
“Sally, fine,” Justin typed. He found a piece of paper and a pencil on her desk and wrote:
SALLY, I’M AT THE BILLY GOAT. PLEASE MEET ME. I’LL BE THERE UNTIL 1 P.M. JUSTIN
Sally acknowledged the note when he set it in front of her, but the avatar did not read it. Instead she went back to typing an imaginary article about an imaginary subject no one would ever read.
Justin rode the elevator back down to the street and walked past the security guard, who seemed unconcerned that he’d lost track of Justin only a few minutes before. He must be a program-operated character, Justin thought. The program lets you get away with much. Real players do not.
He crossed the street, descended a concrete staircase to Lower Michigan Avenue, and walked into the Billy Goat Tavern. He ordered a hamburger, chips, and a cola and found a wobbly table with a view of the door.
The real Billy Goat wasn’t much to look at, and the Shadow Billy Goat reflected that. A long L-shaped bar had been built along two walls, and several televisions hung above it, showing highlights from last night’s Bulls game. The chairs were the institutional kind, with hollow aluminum frames and vinyl seats and backs with a faux wood finish. The linoleum floor was old and dirty. Frames on the walls held photographs, some autographed, of the Shadow Billy Goat’s celebrity patrons. These celebrities fell into three categories – people who were famous in the real world but mostly unknown inside Shadow World; people who led anonymous lives in the real world but who had become famous inside Shadow World; and people who were famous in the real world as well as in Shadow World. Most of those in this last group were True-to-Lifers, extreme celebrity egotists who were unsatisfied with the adoration they received from actual people. They needed the love and attention of a whole other universe. Some of them were intriguing, however, like the current and popular Chicago news anchorwoman whose Shadow World character had left journalism to become a world-famous concert cellist. Now that was cool, Justin thought.
Back in his seat at school, the bell rang and the other students hurried out the door toward the cafeteria. Justin stretched, but hardly anyone noticed that he lingered behind. It wasn’t unusual for students to work in the computer lab through the lunch period, and few of his classmates were close enough to young Justin to care what he had planned for the noon meal. Alone, he turned his attention back to the game.
He was through with his burger and about to open his bag of chips when Shadow Sally walked through the door. She stood at the top of the steps and looked around. When she located Justin she nodded, but she didn’t look happy to see him.
“Justin, a little young to be in a bar by yourself in the middle of the afternoon, aren’t you?” she said.
“Sally, in the real world maybe,” Shadow Justin said. “They’re pretty lax about that here in the game.”
She sat down and nudged two fingers inside Justin’s bag of chips. “What’s going on?” There was no one else within listening distance, so they could stop identifying each other by name. “You’re typing. Are you at school?” If she had a headset on, his voice would have sounded artificial, her computer reproducing his typed words in a flat, mechanical tone. Her spoken words, on the other hand, were spelled out across Justin’s monitor in subtitles.
“Yeah, it sucks,” Justin said. He attempted an awkward segue: “But you know, after all this time, I never had you pegged for a TTL.”
Sally didn’t reply for a moment and Justin wondered if he’d offended her. “No shame in being a True-to-Lifer, is there?”
“None whatsoever,” Justin agreed. “I was surprised, is all. I figured you were just a crime buff like me who got herself a job at a Shadow World newspaper.”
“I am, I guess,” Barwick said. “Except I got myself a job at a real-life newspaper first. How’d you find me out?”
“I saw your byline in the paper this morning.”
“And how’d you know I’d be logging on before one o’clock?”
“I figured a TTL wouldn’t let a lunch break go by without getting in the game.”
“Yeah,” Sally said. “I’m always terrified the program will let my avatar walk into traffic, or slip in front of the El or something. I need to be controlling her as much as possible.”
“When I saw you at your desk, your avatar looked live, but you weren’t there. How is that possible?”
Shadow Sally smiled. “Ancient Shadow World secret. An old TTL trick.”
“I don’t really understand True-to-Life play,” Justin confessed. “You’re just putting her through the motions of your own existence.”
“More or less,” she said. “But that’s the closest thing I can get to understanding the way others see me. That’s the goal of the game, as far as I’m concerned. A lot of people play it in order to create an idealized version of themselves, but I want Shadow Sally to be as much like the real me as possible. Through her, I can get a better handle on who I really am.”
“I’ve never heard a TTL put it that way, exactly,” Justin typed. “That’s kind of cool. I think about that stuff a lot – who I am versus who I think I am versus who other people think I am.”
Sally said, “Interested in the existential mysteries of life? I guess that’s normal for a fifteen-year-old. I forget what it was like to be that age sometimes. Still trying to figure it all out. Wondering what grown-ups know that you don’t.”
“Save me the trouble,” Shadow Justin said. “What do grown-ups know?”
“Not a damn thing. But you have a jones for philosophy? That’s good.”
“Yeah, my mom got me started on that stuff when I was a kid,” Justin wrote.
“Your mother? Why?”
“I don’t know.” Justin typed quickly, not wanting to bring up his shrink and generally trying to steer the subject away from his own life. “I think it’s kind of funny that you’re a True-to-Lifer, though, given some of the conversations we’ve had.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the Wicker Man. I’ve been suggesting since we hooked up in Shadow World that he might be a TTL, a guy who mirrors his real-life killing online.”
“Yeah, so? You think I’m him?” She was kidding, Justin was pretty sure.
“No, I don’t think you’re him. But why do you find my theory so implausible, considering you’re a True-to-Lifer yourself?”
“Because there are so many other explanations that make more sense, Justin. The correct explanation is almost always the simplest one.”
“Occam’s Razor, I know,” Justin typed.
“Huh?”
“William of Occam. Fourteenth-century Franciscan monk. The correct explanation is almost always the simplest one. He said that.” Justin wondered if he was coming across like a know-it-all. He frequently did in real life.
“You’re full of surprises,” Sally said. “It’s hot in here.” Temperature in the game was metered on-screen, and characters were expected to act accordingly – remove clothes, drink liquids – or they would start to get tired. Eventually avatars could become dehydrated and need to go to a Shadow emergency room.
Justin didn’t want to talk about the broken thermostat. “But why is it more likely that the Shadow World murders, or the ones most similar to the Wicker Man killings at least, are being done by a copycat, when we know that a quarter of the folks in Shadow World are True-to-Lifers like you? Why not explore the possibility that the Wicker Man is a gamer and he’s killing in both worlds?”
“Because we have no evidence of that beyond your crazy imagination. And even if it were true, Justin, how would we prove it? The Wicker Man hasn’t left any physical evidence in the real world. On a computer network he’d be a total phantom. No fingerprints, no DNA, no blood evidence.” She paused, as if she were hesitant to say the next thing. “Plus there’s another reason.”
“What?”
“The Wicker Man’s victims are posed, postmortem. The bodies in Shadow World aren’t.”
“Some of them looked kind of posed,” Justin said.
“No, the real Wicker Man victims have their legs spread wide apart, and the left hand is covering their left breast. Every one of them,” Sally said. “The cops have asked to keep that out of the papers so they don’t run up
