When a fantasy gamer gets sick or injured, she usually lets the avatar die. A Shadow World hospital is about as much fun as a real one, and nobody wants to sit through stitches and a physical when she can start the game over instead. There are only two kinds of people with enough at stake to bring their characters to Shadow hospitals: players who’ve achieved great success, fame, or wealth inside the game, and True-to-Lifers. Fortunately, that means the emergency room wait is only half as long.
In front of the computer in his room, Justin worried his mother would hear him talking into his headset. It was getting closer to dawn and his mother – his real mother – would be sleeping less soundly. She had patience with his gaming, but she’d flip if she knew he’d been staying up all night, driving around town with a thirty-five- year-old woman, and getting in knife fights with serial killers. He started typing words for his avatar instead of speaking them.
Shadow Sally sat on an exam table, needlessly dressed down to green scrubs. A doctor, Hannah Wright, conducted a series of unconvincing tests (Justin guessed she was a fantasy player pretending to be a doctor) before telling her she was going to be okay.
“Sally, you have a concussion,” Dr. Wright said. “I’ve ruled out a serious head injury and your spinal cord seems fine. Take acetaminophen when the pain gets to you. Stay away from aspirin or ibuprofen, all right?”
“Dr. Wright, sure.”
The avatar named Dr. Wright took a seat in an orange plastic chair; her eye line was at least eighteen inches below Barwick’s, and she looked up at her with her head tilted to the right. “Sally, do you have someone to stay up with you tonight? Just in case you start showing disorientation? How about your friend here?”
Shadow Justin took a step away from the wall. “Well, yeah. Sure. I mean, I have to go to school in a couple hours,” he said. “But my avatar could stay with her. And I could check in on her every few hours.”
God, he still doesn’t get it, Sally thought. What it means to be a TTL.
“Good,” Dr. Wright said. “I’m sure she’ll be fine. I’d like the two of you to sit here for another half hour, just to make sure there isn’t any unexpected swelling or disorientation.”
“Thanks, Doctor,” Sally said. Dr. Wright left the exam room to see other patients.
At home, Justin – real Justin – was tired. The fight with Coyne had been intense and he wanted to shut down his computer and get an hour of sleep before school. But he knew if he left his avatar alone with Sally’s, it wouldn’t be able to monitor her “orientation.”
“You don’t have to stay,” Barwick said.
“No, I want to,” he typed. “How are you feeling?”
“Better,” she said. “Avatars heal quickly.”
“Yeah, but did they factor in all the symptoms right? On a percentage basis? You could just drop dead from an aneurysm or whatever.”
“Thanks.”
The energy meter on Justin’s screen dipped to a critically low level, and he grabbed the orange chair. Even if he wasn’t going to sleep tonight, his avatar could use a little rest.
Shadow Sally sat on the exam table, her fingers tucked under her thighs. Her bruise was already healing, an indication from the game, Justin suspected, that her injuries weren’t going to be so bad.
“Can I ask you a question?” he said.
“Of course.”
“Why is this life so important to you? I mean, I play the game. It’s fun. Why did you need to come here to the hospital? If your online life is exactly the same as your real one, why can’t you just start over if something happens to you? It seems like you wouldn’t even lose a day.”
Sally said, “The best way I can explain it – it’s sort of a Zen thing. The goal of being a True-to-Lifer is to make the two existences, online and off-line, equally important. Equally real. Some TTLs treat their avatar like a yin to their yang, trying to channel their less attractive impulses into a fictional character so they can be a better person in real life. Others, like me, are trying to lead two nearly identical lives. If I were to die in Shadow World, I would feel the pain as if a real person had been lost. And if I were to die in real life, my avatar would hopefully go on without me.”
“Go on without you? What are you talking about?”
“If you don’t log in to the game for sixty days, Shadow World shuts down your account. Your character disappears, and if you perform a necessary function, you’re replaced by another player or game-controlled character. But a good True-to-Lifer can fool the program. His avatar is so realistic even when a real person isn’t controlling him, he can continue on in the game for months or even years after the player who created him passes away. If you pay attention, you can see them, walking around Shadow World. They have a sad look. Mournful.”
“So you’re something like twins,” Justin said. “Twins with the same mind.”
Sally nodded. “I like that.”
Justin stood up and walked to the door. Nurses were leading worried avatars between exam rooms, medicating them. Healing them. Sitting at computers, their players no doubt were praying the ailments and injuries weren’t serious. “The yin and yang thing. What if Coyne is one of those kind of TTLs? What if he’s not just trying to blow off steam? What if he’s trying to… to banish the Wicker Man from the real world into the game? What if he wants to rid his real self of these horrible impulses and put them all into his character online, where he can’t hurt flesh-and-blood people?”
“ Oh God. I don’t think so,” Barwick said.
“Why not?” Shadow Justin was annoyed. “You dismiss everything as soon as I say it, but you have to admit, some of my nutty theories have proven right. Isn’t it possible that the real Sam Coyne is trying to stop himself from killing, and he’s trying to use the game as a way to rid himself of the illness that compels him to attack women?”
“I doubt it,” Sally said, “because right now I think the real Sam Coyne is standing outside my window.”
– 80 -
Through a window in the spare bedroom, cracked even in winter because of an irritating anomaly in the ductwork that always baked this corner of the town house while other rooms froze, Barwick heard him when he jumped the iron fence into her tiny, neglected back garden. In a sweatshirt and black jeans, he looked like a panther against the new covering of snow, but less graceful, putting his face clumsily to the downstairs windows, peering inside. If he was a predator, he didn’t seem to be stalking prey so much as peeping it.
That was Sam Coyne for sure. She recognized the blond mess of hair and, when he looked up into a streetlight, those cheekbones. Maybe he is a TTL after all, she thought. The avatar didn’t lie.
Still online with Justin, she dialed 911. She also tried to come up with a way to defend herself. As she gave her address to the emergency operator, the closest thing to a plan she could manage was to grab a softball bat from under the bed.
“How did he find out where you live?” Justin asked. “Or even who you are?” Sally could hear Justin’s own voice again. He must have picked up the headset.
“I don’t know,” Barwick said, standing at her computer now, whispering, trying to figure out where Coyne had gone. “Maybe someone at the club recognized me from the story I did on their opening.”
“You think?”
Without her even commanding it, Sally’s avatar looked around the hospital room and then down at her own hands. Watching it on-screen, the action jolted real Sally. “Oh shit!” she said into her headset. “My purse! I left my purse in the garage! My Shadow ID is the same as my real one. Shit!”
“Do you have a weapon or something?” Justin asked. “Like a gun or a bat?”
“You know, for a deep thinker, you’re about two minutes behind the curve,” she said. “Do you think I should hide? In the closet?”
“No!” Justin yelped. “How will I know you’re okay if you’re away from the computer?”
“Not a priority for me right now, Justin.”
She removed her headset and bounced from window to window, following the man as he made the perimeter of the house. If he was the Wicker Man, so notorious for leaving no evidence at the scenes of his crimes, Coyne was
