Slum Online (8 page)

I felt Fumiko’s gaze on the back of my head as we walked.

One night in a Shinjuku hotel cost nine thousand yen. Enough to pay the subscription to
Versus Town
for ten months. Enough that I’d have to cancel my cell phone and use the money to pay for the game instead. Enough that it hurt. Not enough to make me complain to Fumiko.

CHAPTER 5

I PRESSED THE
BUTTON and became Tetsuo. It was 1:50 in the morning. In Versus Town it was the middle of the day. Tetsuo headed for Sanchōme.

Sanchōme was the sort of place that ordinary people would have associated with the term “virtual reality.” There were houses no one lived in, stores with nothing for sale, characters hanging around doing nothing in particular. Shops stood along the road, their shelves lined with cans and boxes that were, in fact, only textures pasted on the polygons of the shelves. The buttons on the vending machines were textures too. You couldn’t even push them. There were crosswalks painted on the streets, but not a single car. At least for now, characters in this city existed only to fight.

If the stories were true, Sanchōme was also the stalking ground of the mysterious ganker.

Today’s objective: finding the ganker and fighting him. No matter how good he was, Tetsuo should be able to give him a run for his money. Who knows, Tetsuo might even be the first character to beat him. If Tetsuo could beat a character who himself had beaten one of the top four, then Pak, arguably the best and easily the most famous character in Versus Town, was sure to want to fight him. And if Tetsuo could beat Pak, there was no one left to beat. Everyone would know he was the best.

I tapped the stick twice. Tetsuo broke into a run.

Sanchōme was squalid and cluttered. Compared to Main Street, the roads felt tight and claustrophobic. Objects whose purpose I couldn’t begin to guess littered the roadside. Tetsuo spent all his time in Itchōme and Nichōme, so he hadn’t learned the ins and outs of Sanchōme’s virtual world.

I kicked a reddish brown cylinder blocking the road. A clanging sound FX. It must have been a steel drum.

The drum was just the tip of the iceberg. There were metal pipes, cans of kerosene, rocks thrown in for variety, shapes I couldn’t make heads or tails of—a truly extravagant display of polygons lay rotting in the streets. Each time I rounded a corner I was greeted by a new piece of debris, making it difficult to run in a straight line. It felt like an RPG dungeon they had turned over to the intern to design. Tetsuo weaved his way through narrow alleyways, dashing from one clump of litter to the next.

In spite of it being midday, the streets of Sanchōme were devoid of other characters. The only signs that anyone was there at all were fleeting glimpses Tetsuo caught of shapes darting out of one building and into another. The buildings themselves were a mix of Western-style houses with facades of woven ivy textures and Japanese houses with polygonal tiles set neatly on their roofs. Some of the houses were clearly occupied, but none had signs declaring to whom they belonged. I wanted to follow the runners and exchange some words, but each time a door flew open, I felt my resolve shrivel.

There was no private property in Versus Town. Tetsuo could go into any of the buildings these characters were darting in and out of. But what you could do and what you should do weren’t always the same thing. Sanchōme probably had its own unwritten code of conduct. The thought of invading the privacy of characters Tetsuo had never met before didn’t sit too well either.

Still wanting for any specific destination, Tetsuo roamed the mazelike streets. He had been exploring for about thirty minutes when he came across a solitary man who was repeatedly jumping into a wall. His body was wrapped in a deep indigo shinobi outfit, and on his feet he wore a pair of rubber-soled tabi so black they swallowed the light. One look at his stance and I could tell, despite the ninja gear, that he was a lightweight jujutsuka.

The man would start his run at the wall from a distance of about ten steps, springing into the air when only three steps remained between him and the wall. He traced a gently curving parabola as he rose, reaching its apex just before he came in contact with the wall. His jump had come just short of reaching the top. On his current trajectory, he would crash into the wall. In the instant he hung at the pinnacle of his leap, he twisted his body to the side. He had given the command to air-block. The polygons that formed his body caught on the top of the wall. He repeated the air-block command, shifting his center of gravity and sending him slipping down the far side of the wall.

There were several different kinds of wall in Versus Town. There was the wall that surrounded the city, which was impossible to pass through or over. There were walls that anyone could leap over with a simple jump. And then there were walls like the one the jujutsuka was repeatedly jumping, walls that could be overcome with just the right combination of skill and technique.

A short while later the jujutsuka came sailing back over the wall the same way he’d jumped it a few moments before. Then it was back ten steps, run, leap, and air-block all over again. Back and forth, forth and back he jumped over the wall, practicing the way Tetsuo refined his air combos on the wooden dummies in the arena. It seemed Tetsuo had found just the sort of back alley freak who might actually listen to him.

The jujutsuka was making it over the wall about two times out of three. It was a high wall, higher than a middleweight like Tetsuo would have any chance of jumping. The complexity of commands needed to perform a wall jump like this would place it among the most difficult of moves, E-rank all the way.

Tetsuo approached the jujutsuka. I pulled out my keyboard to break the ice.

> Hello.

The jujutsuka canceled out of the dash he’d just begun and turned to face Tetsuo. He stood 45 degrees to Tetsuo’s left, three and a half paces away. Just far enough to be out of range of a dash throw. Text bubbled above his head.

> Good day, sir. Fine weather we’re having, is it not?

Versus Town wasn’t exactly a setting for role-playing. Ignoring his odd choice of words and the fact that the weather was always fine, I replied.

> It is.

> Just so. Here, the sun always shines.

> That it does.

Tetsuo’s answer lingered above his head. I was still trying to decide what he should say next when the jujutsuka spoke again.

> Might I be of some service?

> Yeah, about that.

> Alas, I am but a novice who has only begun to walk the warrior’s path. Ours would be an ill match.

> I’m not here to duel.

> Then perhaps you should remove your headband, my lord.

He raised his hand to indicate the white headband holding back Tetsuo’s hair. It was a skillful and fluid gesture.

When your health dropped to zero anywhere outside the arena, the system forced you to log out. It was a feature designed to keep the city from descending into chaos with brawls on every street corner. When you logged back in, you had to go through the hassle of getting back to wherever you’d been. But this wasn’t enough to deter everyone. A faction of players decided that since it was a fighting game, they wanted to fight. They started wearing headbands and wristbands to identify themselves. Before long, the town was neatly divided into two groups, characters who chose to fight anytime, anywhere, and those who fought only in the arena. It was a little bit like gangs showing their colors. At a glance, you could tell where someone stood and know how to approach them.

The white headband encircling Tetsuo’s head signaled that he was a top-tier fighter who would accept challenges anywhere in the game. The jujutsuka standing in front of him wore neither headband nor wristband. Unlike Tetsuo, he clearly had no interest in street fighting.

> Of late, danger has come even here to Sanchōme. People have grown obsessed with farcical duels. Alas, I can scarcely scale a wall in peace.

> I thought fighting was the whole point.

> The point is what you make of it. I’ll not deny that many choose to make dueling that point, but dueling in and of itself has no more or less meaning than jumping walls.

He had worked out quite a little philosophy for himself, but we were starting to stray off-topic.

> I’m not here to duel. I’m looking for someone.

The jujutsuka relaxed his stance.

> And who might that be?

> Have you heard about the snake boxer?

> Snake boxer?

> They say he hangs out somewhere around here.

> This place teems with eagles and snakes. They’re two of the best schools, as you must surely know.

> The snake I’m looking for is no ordinary snake.

> An extraordinary snake, then?

> Extraordinary enough to beat 963. One of the top four.

> Ah, then it is Jack whom you seek.

> Jack?

> The shadow who stalks Sanchōme.

> That’s the guy.

> Here he is known as Ganker Jack.

The jujutsuka folded his arms. The shadow of the wall that towered over us lay unmoving at our feet.

The web of roads and alleyways grew more and more complex the further I went.

After he had parted ways with the jujutsuka, Tetsuo had gone back toward the outskirts of Sanchōme. According to his new friend, there was a saloon in Versus Town where people went to swap stories about the comings and goings in the virtual city. If I wanted to hear more about Ganker Jack, he assured me, there was no surer place to go.

I tilted the stick gently up and to the right. Tetsuo hopped over a log blocking the middle of the street. There was much more to Sanchōme than I had imagined. Houses, one very much like the next, lined long, winding streets. A passage that, at a distance, seemed nothing more than an alley barely wide enough for a person to pass could lead to vast, empty courtyards. And not a single character appeared to break the emptiness.

I’d heard European cities from the Middle Ages were rife with blind alleys and dogleg roads. They actually designed the cities to be difficult to navigate as a defense against invasion. Sanchōme appeared to be built on the same premise. Its tangled skein of roads and byways seemed tailor-made to prevent the uninitiated from penetrating its veil. Each new road looked very much like the last. It was as though the saloon was not
meant
to be found.

By the time I finally did find it, ten minutes had passed since I left the jujutsuka. Even coming straight from Itchōme it would probably take fifteen minutes to get here.

Tetsuo stood in front of the bar. The place looked like something out of a spaghetti Western. The walls were covered with textures of weather-beaten wood. The only entrance was a pair of swinging doors. Nearby, a lone wooden barrel stood sentry. Above the entrance, an old sign rested atop two massive beams. The polygons of the sign were just crooked enough to draw attention to themselves. Unlike RL, in a virtual world you had to go out of your way to make anything that wasn’t perfectly parallel with everything else. JTS SALOON declared the sign in giant letters. The only thing missing was a good whinny sound FX.

Tetsuo pushed the swinging doors open and peered in.

Inside was murky and dim. Two characters stood in front of the bar, having a conversation. There were probably others further back in the room, but it was too dark to be sure. Maybe staring at the sunlit cityscape for so long just made the saloon seem darker than it was.