It was a minute before I discovered that I was on the rough carpet of the mall’s virtual reality booth. The fall had jarred the helmet from my head, breaking the connection, and I clutched at the carpet, drenched in sweat. Oh, my God, what was that, anyway?! It scared me to death! I was covered in sweat, my heart was pounding, and my chest still hurt from where the bullet hit! It just about gave me a heart—a heart…
…A heart attack.
Home was two miles away, but I didn’t stop running until I was inside. With my last gasp of breath I slammed the door, shot the deadbolt home, and collapsed against it, gasping for breath. I sagged to the floor, trembling and crying. I stayed there for a long time, with all kinds of thoughts flooding through me. Grampa didn’t die of natural causes, like the doctor said. It wasn’t his time, like Dad said. God hadn’t called him home, like Gramma said.
He was murdered. Somebody took Grampa away from me before he was supposed to go.
And somebody was gonna be sorry.
Anger
I spent a lot of time alone. I spent a lot of time going through the stuff I had done with Grampa, and a lot of time at the virtual arcade. Everyone thought I was playing my space games, but they were wrong.
Once I overheard Mom and Dad talking about sending me to a shrink to help me deal with the death of Grampa. I didn’t care. They didn’t know what I knew, and they weren’t going to find out. Nobody was gonna know. But somebody was gonna be sorry.
It didn’t take long to figure out how the killers rigged the virtual gunman. It was just a five-second sight-sound-feel packet that had been laid in over the regular Virtual Meadow program. It had a timing device, like a software bomb, that activated the packet after the twenty-third time it was used.
And then, after it ran once, it must have erased itself. The program disk didn’t have any gunman in the lilacs. It was only on Grampa’s recording of that one time.
Grampa had been using the Virtual Meadow disk every day, for over a year. But if the gunman was programmed to activate after twenty-three uses, that meant that somebody had put it into his disk just before he retired from his job. Or, more likely, had laid the killer packet into an identical disk, and switched them when Grampa wasn’t looking.
But knowing how it was done didn’t help me much. I needed to know why.
And who.
I figured it had to be somebody who was a professional, which meant, somebody where Grampa used to work. Researching his company didn’t tell me much. Advanced Game Tek was a large corporation that was making a lot of money. Big deal. They held 60 percent of the world’s market share in virtual games, and 90 percent of the market share in kid’s games. They were a wholly-owned subsidiary of SKS Holdings, which was a big holding company that included a major food manufacturer and SKS Products, which made cigarettes.
Big deal. This didn’t help at all.
I was screwed.
There’s this big old oak tree in our back yard that I used to play in a lot when I was little. I still go and hang out around it, because there’s lots of bushes nearby, and you can sit in the lower branches, or on the ground around it, and nobody would see you. It’s a nice place to sit and think.
Well, I was hacking around one day, not sure what to do about finding out more about Grampa’s killer, and I decided to climb the old oak tree. It’s comforting, somehow.
I sat in the lower branches for awhile, but got restless. Up in the tree, in one of the first big crotches of the tree, there’s a hole. You wouldn’t even know it unless you were right on top of it. I’d used it as a hiding place for valuable stuff when I was a kid. The only other person I’d ever shown it to was Grampa. So I checked it for the first time in ages, just to see what junk I’d left in there.
It wasn’t interesting: an old pocket-knife, some moldy candy, a stiff packet of gum, and a couple of comic books. Boring junk, but I flipped through the comics for a minute, since I didn’t have anything else to do.
I didn’t even notice when something slipped out of one of the comics, except it went smack when it hit the dirt below the tree.
I climbed down to look at it. There were a bunch of white, printed pages with handwritten notes on them, folded over and sealed in a plastic bag. I got quite a shock when I realized that it was Grampa’s handwriting in the margins!
I ripped open the bag and pulled out the papers. Written on the top of the first one was a note to me.
Greg-man, if you find this stuff, let’s keep it our secret, OK? Keep it hidden, and tell me about it in private.
Well, for crying out loud! I never knew that grampas had secrets, too.
I couldn’t tell Grampa that I’d found it, of course, but maybe I should tell Gramma. But Grampa wanted this to be our secret, so I couldn’t. I couldn’t even tell Mom and Dad.
I went up to my room and looked the stuff over. It was software stuff, no question about that. Grampa must have gotten them from work. The code stuff was over my head, but Grampa had written notes to himself in the margins, and with his help I thought that maybe I could figure it out.
The notes called for a virtual adventure game that I happened to have, so I popped it into my computer. I was glad that the notes called for that one, because it was one of my favorites, and I had sure missed it when Grampa had borrowed it for a couple weeks, about a month ago.
Basically, Grampa’s notes gave me a kind of mechanical-password way to get into the code of the game, wading through the different events that made the thing click, until I got to the end of his list. I stared at it. This was a disappointment—just a software packet, like thousands I’d waded through. Except smaller, maybe. And kind of hidden somehow. I didn’t think I would have run across it unless I’d had Grampa’s instructions.
I shrugged and opened it up. I should have known better than to think that adults had interesting stuff going on.
Strange thing about that packet—it wasn’t a sight-sound-feel. It was straight feel, with a sight intensifier tacked on, and it was coordinated to kick in at three different places in the game. Each time, it lasted for only three seconds.
It took some time, but I finally figured out how to find the three different spots that activated Grampa’s strange little packet. The problem was, the codes were so complex that I couldn’t figure out what they represented. I flagged the packet, and the three places it was supposed to kick in, and went to the mall.
I reviewed the rules of the game. It was kind of a takeoff of the old Indiana Jones adventures, where I was a daring adventurer, armed with a six-shooter, a whip and a sword. I had to run a gauntlet of obstacles to achieve my ultimate goal of finding a priceless gem. I loved this game, because it was so different from real life. In this game, I knew the rules, I was equipped to handle anything that came at me, and I knew that if I just practiced enough, I’d win.
I popped in the smart card with the program, and told the server to just show me the parts I’d identified. Then I put on my goggles and
I was in a cavern, facing the smooth, suave Nazi who was my main enemy. Securely protected by a bullet-proof window, he nonchalantly lit a cigarette (oh, wow, cool!) and activated the wall of spears! I knew how to handle this, and leapt aside into a tunnel…
The giant spiders swarmed around me, climbing the rock walls to drop on me. I swept out my sword and laid waste right and left. I expertly flicked the last one off the ceiling with my whip, and impaled it on my sword as it fell. Since I disposed of them within the time limits, a beautiful woman appeared in a small window in the cavern. She smiled admiringly at me, lit a cigarette (oh, wow, cool!), and suddenly…