Slum Online (7 page)

I sighed. There were things I understood that Fumiko didn’t. She was a kid who’d just swung a bat for the first time, and now she wanted to go up against the New York Yankees. It might have looked like a fair fight; they both had the same joystick, the same buttons, the same screen. But the gulf of experience between Fumiko and her unseen challenger was wide and unfathomably deep.

Fumiko lost the next match in under thirty seconds. I thought about telling whoever was playing her to go easy, since she was obviously a beginner, but I didn’t say anything. She had sat down at a head-to-head game, so if a challenger wanted to wipe the floor with her, there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Those were the rules of the RL arcade.

Fumiko rose to her feet in a huff. “It’s only a game. So how come I feel so humiliated?”

“Because it’s only a game. C’mon, let’s go.”

“Not so fast. I want revenge.” Her eyes gleamed with determination. “This is the kind of game you play, right?”

“Forget it.”

“Why?”

“If it means that much to you, you should practice until you’re good enough to get your own revenge.”

Fumiko looked up at me with puppy-dog eyes. Apparently I hadn’t quite worked off the notebook debt yet. There was only one way out. I sat down at the controls, slid a coin into the slot, and selected the karateka.

I didn’t have a grudge against the jujutsuka who challenged Fumiko, and I didn’t want to go overboard with her right there, so I only gave the fight about 80 percent. I won the best-of-three match in forty seconds.

I heard a man shout from the other side of the cabinet. Another challenger appeared—an eagle claw. This wasn’t the same player who used the jujutsuka against Fumiko.

Eagle claw was a style of gongfu that focused on attacks made with the hand held in a position resembling—you guessed it— the claw of an eagle. They had a wide range of hand techniques at their disposal, and they could easily defeat an opponent in a single flurry of attacks. The eagle claw stylist was one of the most powerful characters in the game.

Using a cancel trick, the eagle claw could access certain secret moves. As it turns out, the arcade version of the game still had some bugs. If you canceled out of a spin attack, you could interrupt the move
after
the game had registered the attack. Since the move was considered canceled, the attacker could go right into his next move. The person on the receiving end, however, faced a recovery time whether he’d blocked the attack or taken the hit, so once the move landed he would take an endless string of hits. People who knew the game called such tricks the Dark Arts, and it was playing dirty.

The eagle claw canceled out of a spin punch and immediately threw, and canceled, a reverse punch. In all of three seconds, my karateka had been knocked out of the ring. I lost the round.

“He kicked your ass.”

“Quiet.”

I took a deep breath, cleared my head, and concentrated on the screen.

Unlike RL, the rules in computer games were relentlessly rigid. There was no gray area. Sure, the guy sitting on the other side of the cabinet had turned to the Dark Arts, but in a very real way, the bug that made that possible was just another rule. It wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. Crying foul wouldn’t change a damn thing. If taking one hit meant losing the round, all you had to do was avoid getting hit. I could do that. At least I hoped I could.

I won the next round without a scratch. From behind the cabinet I heard the sound FX of a fist striking the control panel. It didn’t bother me. I was the karateka now. My body was nothing more than the CPU controlling it. A CPU didn’t get angry. A CPU didn’t bring its fist crashing down on the control panel. I won three matches in a row. Six flawless victories. The man sitting on the other side of the cabinet stood up.

There was no expression on his face. A poorly rendered texture was plastered over the polygons that made up his head. Three earrings sparkled in his right ear. His left ear was unadorned. He looked a little taller than me.

“Well? Ain’t you got nothin’ to say for yourself?”

“Ain’t,” I answered, not stirring from my seat, “ain’t a word. Or didn’t you learn anything in school?” A burst of laughter erupted from behind the cabinet. Three Earrings’s pal.

“You’re startin’ to piss me off.”

“Only starting? Must be losing my touch.”

“You wanna come say that to my face, bitch?”

“Etsuro, don’t,” Fumiko interjected, twenty minutes too late.

“You should go on home,” I said, standing.

Three Earrings, his pal, and I walked out of the arcade. Two against one was hardly a fair fight, but I don’t think fair was high on their agenda, and I didn’t bother to ask. Most of what happened in RL gave fair a wide berth. The only rules that mattered were the rules of wherever you happened to be, and you could count on each and every person to follow his own interpretation. Right and wrong were in the eye of the beholder, and they were secrets best kept to yourself.

We fought in the back alleys of Shinjuku. An air conditioner was kicking up a racket of a sound FX. I threw a punch and missed. One of them threw a punch and hit. My health gauge went into freefall. Their fists rained down on me so fast I was fairly certain they were using the cancel bug. I gritted my teeth. A knee hit me in the stomach and I rose into the air. Just a bunny hop, really, compared to the graceful arcs traced by a character hit with a counter in
Versus Town
.
This is too easy
, I laughed to myself.

My health gauge dropped to zero.

“Are you okay?”

My eyes opened at the sound of Fumiko’s voice.

I was lying lengthwise across a rock-hard bench. Fumiko was cradling my head in her lap. She had placed a damp handkerchief over my face. My mouth tasted of iron and blood and cloth. Moving would have required too much effort, so I just lay there with my head in her lap, listening to the sound FX of her beating heart.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was my fault.”

“No, it wasn’t you.”

“You usually go around picking fights?”

“Actually, that was the first fight I’ve ever been in.”

“Like I said, my fault.”

“No, I was asking for it.”

It really wasn’t Fumiko’s fault. There was something deep inside me that had made me take things too far. The sound FX of Three Earrings punching the control panel, something I could never hear an opponent do over the Internet, might have had something to do with it. Truth was, I couldn’t explain exactly what had made me do it, so I didn’t even try.

“Does it hurt?”

“No more than you’d expect.”

“You’re bleeding,” she said, gently wiping my lips. I felt the heat building in my chest rush out between my teeth.

“A balloon full of blood,” I muttered.

“What?”

“Something a friend of mine said once. People are two-thirds water, so we’re just a bag of skin with blood sloshing around inside. That’s why we bleed when we’re hurt.”

“You think he’s right?”

I closed my eyes. “I dunno.” A red balloon drifted through my thoughts.

Around when I started elementary school, my mother took me to a rooftop fair at one of the local department stores. There was a person dressed up in a bear costume. If you beat the bear in a game of rock-paper-scissors, you won a balloon. Not a silvery, Roswell UFO balloon. A shiny, blood-red balloon.

I figured out how to win watching the bear play his first game. His hands were essentially mittens, so he could only throw rock and paper. Watching a few more games, I noticed the bear was delivering rock and paper pretty much fifty-fifty. If it was a tie you got to go again, so as long as you kept throwing out paper, sooner or later you’d win. With a setup like that, you’d have to be a dolt to lose to the bear. Of course the whole point was to keep the kids happy, so I’m sure they had enough on hand to give every kid in the place and his brother a balloon. But to me it didn’t seem very sporting to keep throwing out paper against an opponent who could only choose between rock and paper.

When my turn finally came, I went with scissors. The bear played rock. I didn’t get a balloon. I had traded a red balloon for my honor. Clenching my six-year-old fist, I watched a balloon bobbing in the proud hand of one of the winners. I didn’t regret the choice I made, but it didn’t make the taste of loss any less bitter.

I don’t think I’ve changed all that much since then.

“Are you listening?”

“What?”

Fumiko held my head between her palms. “You’re so warm.” The faint smell of olive blossoms hung in the air.

I opened my eyes. Fumiko was staring down at me with onyx eyes the same jet-black color as her hair. A smile blossomed on her face. “You say some weird things.”

“Really? I just say what comes into my head.”

“Most people put their thoughts through filter after filter, until they’ve distilled out all the impurities.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re weak.”

“I don’t feel all that strong.”

“But you are.”

A gentle breeze caressed my cheek. It felt good against my burning skin. I could smell her on that breeze. I couldn’t tell whether the air was warm or cool.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“The park near City Hall.”

“How’d we get here?”

“You walked on your own two feet.” She told me I’d fought with those guys for nearly twenty minutes before the attendant she called broke it up.

“What time is it?”

“Nearly one o’clock.”

“Where do you live?”

“Gotanda.”

“Then you better hurry.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll sleep here till morning.”

“I can’t leave you here like this.”

“Maybe not.”

The Tōbu Tōjō line had already stopped running, but if Fumiko hurried, she could still make the last train to Gotanda. I let my eyes flutter closed.

A splash sound FX. Something cold on my right hand.

“It’s raining.” Fumiko must have felt it too.

The skies were clear, but the volume of the
plop plop plop
sound FX rose, the number of drops on my arms keeping pace.

Of all the times for it to rain. My mouth twisted into a wry smile.

Fumiko’s voice rose above the rain. “We’ll be soaked if we stay here.”

“It’s just a summer rain. It’ll pass.”

“We should go somewhere. I know a place that stays open until morning.”

“I don’t feel like sitting.”

“Then what should we do?”

“We can sleep here,” I offered. “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.”

There was a long pause before she spoke again. “Then we’re not going to do anything?”

“What’s there to do?”

“You know…whatever.”

“Either way.” Not the right answer.

“Try not to care so much.”

“Sorry. I’m just tired,” I said.

“I know, I know. Sorry.”

Another uncomfortable pause. My turn to break it. “Hey, I was wondering. What were you doing in Kabuki-chō tonight?”

“Looking for that cat. You know, the blue one that makes dreams come true.”

The conversation with the bat lady came rushing back to me.
You won't have much luck during the day.

Finding an honor student like Fumiko in a place like Kabukichō, after hours no less, didn’t make a helluva lot of sense, but the cat thing explained it. Fumiko Nagihara, a girl who searched the RL streets of Kabuki-chō by night for a blue cat, a girl who could flash a disarming hamburger-shop smile, did, in fact, have some interesting quirks lurking just beneath the surface. I didn’t believe for a second this blue cat actually existed, but something in me envied the fact that she did.

The two RL thugs who’d given me a complimentary twentyminute deep tissue massage were just a couple of ordinary punks. They weren’t world champions. They were nobodies. There would be no pride, no honor, in training through some power ballad montage to take my revenge on the likes of them. Scouring the virtual world to fight the best of the best was much more appealing. The object of my search didn’t exist in RL, with its multitude of lossless-quality sound FX.