Blow Me Down Read online

  I thought for a moment, mentally reviewing the latest credit card statement. “Ah. That would explain the rash of phone calls to your father when we moved here last month. You talked him into paying for that game.”

  “It’s not just a game,” she said, her hands on her hips. “It has layers. And it’s about to become virtual reality.”

  “Uh-huh.” I turned back to my desk. “As I recall from what you showed me, it was simply a simulation of some vaguely Caribbean pirate setting with a lot of murder and mayhem.”

  “That’s only one part of it. Most players think that the goal of the game is to go pillaging—that’s attacking other ships to take their money and goods—but really the game is a complex social infrastructure of colonization and world building. Right now my crew is about to go into defense mode to protect our island from the evil Black Corbin, who wants to take it from us.”

  “Your crew?” I asked, making a mental note to talk to Bill about feeding Tara’s unhealthy addiction to online games.

  “Yeah, I’m the crew wench.”

  My eyebrows rose as I envisioned the letter I’d send to the game’s creator about putting a minor in an adult situation.

  “You can just stop with the Mom Brows. It’s nothing like that,” Tara said, the disgusted tone in her voice doing much to reassure me. She hadn’t yet expressed an interest in the opposite sex, something I was all too happy about. “Our crew is led by Bartholomew Portuguese. He’s based on a real pirate, by the way. PC Monroe said he did tons and tons of research on him to make the character believable.”

  “I see. Still, I told you two months ago that schoolwork took precedence over world building. Playing a pirate won’t get you into college—”

  “PC Monroe says the economical model that the game uses is a real one, and that to understand and be successful at it means I have a good head for business. I have a weaving shop. I sell cloth. I make money at it, Mom.”

  Her calculated dig hit pay dirt, despite my better intentions. “What sort of economic model? How much profit do you make?”

  “A lot.” The smile that blazed across her face was rife with pure satisfaction. “Enough to buy me three sloops. I even have a spreadsheet that I use to keep track of costs and profits.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her again. “That was a low blow. You are an evil child to use my love of spreadsheets against me like that.”

  Her grin turned up a notch. “You always say you have to be ruthless in business, and this is all economics. Buying and selling and profit margins and supply and demand. Only it’s set in a pirate world rather than this one.”

  “Hmm.” I wondered for a moment what pirate finances would look like. How much would monthly grog expenditures run, and could you depreciate the costs of storing it?

  “You’d make a killing there,” my little rat-in-child-form added in a persuasive tone of voice. “With your business degree and stuff, you’d be rich in no time. I bet you could even have your own crew.”

  For a moment an image flashed on my mind’s eye of myself standing at the helm of a tall ship, the sails fully rigged, the bow of the ship cutting through the azure waters, salty sea air brushing my face as I ordered the cannons to fire on some helpless ship. A little voice deep inside of me let out a cheer, but it was quickly squelched as another rumble brought me back to the present and reality. I turned back to my computer. “Good try, Tara, but not quite good enough.”

  The teasing light in her eyes died. “Dad would do it.”

  I flipped a couple of pages of the symposium paper to find a quote I needed. “I’m sure he would. He has little else to do with his time while he is between acting jobs.”

  “At least he spends time with me! At least he’s interested in the things I’m interested in! All you want to do is work, work, work. You don’t care about me or anything I want to do. I wish I was living with Dad instead of you!”

  “I refuse to get into a comparison argument of my parenting skills versus your father’s,” I answered, quickly typing up a couple more sentences. “And I hardly see how my lack of participation in a silly game can be thrown in my face as depriving you of attention.”

  “Because! If you were playing it, too, we could be on the same crew. And you could help me with my weaving shop, and I could teach you how to sail a ship.”

  “I don’t have time to learn how to sail a ship, and besides, I get seasick easily.”

  “You won’t even try! You won’t even look at it!” she wailed, throwing her hands in the air in a gesture of sheer frustration.

  I’m not a monster. I might admit to being a bit more caught up in my job than was normal, but I took pride in the fact that I had a solid work ethic, and took responsibility for making sure that my job, and the jobs of those I could help around me, were done to the best of my ability. Despite all that, the underlying plea in Tara’s voice generated an unpleasant ripple of guilt within me. I had no intention of wasting my time playing a nerdy online game, but if it would make her feel I was more involved in her life, it wouldn’t hurt me to at least see what it was about.

  “All right,” I said, forestalling the emotional eruption I knew that was soon to follow. “If it will make you happier, I’ll take a look at the game.”

  She was silent for a moment. “You will? You’ll sign on? The whole thing, the VR unit version? It’s majorly cool.”

  I frowned. “How much does it cost?”

  Her stormy brow cleared like magic. “You can use my account. We get four characters per account, and I’ve only made one. You can make one, just to see if you like it. It won’t cost you anything. Here, I’ll write down my password and user name.” She snatched up a sticky notepad and scribbled out the name Terrible Tara and the name of our deceased dog. “Later on you can get your own account so we can play together at the same time. Maybe I can get a second VR unit.”

  “Whoa, I just said I’d take a look. I have no intention of doing anything more—”

  She stopped in the doorway, her eyes dark with mutiny.

  “I knew it! You won’t go into it with an open mind! You’ll just look and say it’s a silly time waster!”

  “Hey, now. I am just as capable as the next person of keeping an open mind,” I said, giving her my best quelling look. It didn’t do any good. It seldom did.

  “You will not. Your mind is already made up to think it’s silly.”

  I held up my hand to stop her. “I admit to being a bit biased, but I will promise to give the game every chance. Happy now?”

  “No,” she answered, her face still stormy.

  “Are you questioning my word of honor?” I asked, frowning.

  “Yes. No. Maybe. It’s just that you are so . . . so . . .”

  “Dedicated to my job?”

  “Dead,” she answered, throwing her hands up in a frustrated gesture. “Honestly, Mom, you don’t do anything fun! This VR game has all sorts of things that you’ll like, if you just give it a chance. There’s tons of economy stuff.”

  “I do have interests beyond those of a fiduciary nature,” I pointed out, vaguely insulted.

  “Name one,” she countered.

  I glared at her and ignored the challenge. “I have said I would give the game a fair chance. That’s the best I can do.”

  Her eyes narrowed as she chewed on her lower lip for a moment. “I know! You have to make officer.”

  “I what?” My gaze strayed back toward the computer screen and my work.

  “You have to make officer. It’s a goal. You like goals; you’re always telling me to have them.” She hurried on before I could point out that the two things weren’t the same. “If you advance in the game to officer status, I’ll know you really kept an open mind.”

  “How hard is achieving officerhood?” I asked, flipping to a spreadsheet of the current year’s budget.

  “Piece of cake. I was an officer in, like . . . well . . . really quickly.”

  I knew how those computer games worked—to advan
ce you had to open a secret passageway or collect some object or run over a magic spot or something silly like that. It shouldn’t be much of a challenge, and if it kept the peace, it would be worth the sacrifice of my time. “Hmm. All right, since it means so much to you, I will give the game an hour or so and become an officer.”

  “Woohoo! You can use my laptop—it has the game client on it already. I’ll bring it and the VR parts down here right now. You can play on the battery so you don’t have to be plugged into the wall in case the power goes out. Thanks, Mom!” She gave me a quick hug before running out of the room. “I’m going to go tell my captain really quickly that you’re logging on later, so if he sees you he’ll be nice to you and stuff.”

  “Wait. Tara, I didn’t mean this second—oy.” The door to her bedroom upstairs slammed. I started to roll my eyes again but switched to a flinch when another loud peal of thunder and gust of wind made the windows rattle. As quickly as I could I finished typing up the press release, e-mailed copies of it to the organization’s director, the media contacts, and my work e-mail address, then made a quick backup of all my recent work.

  “You are so anal it’s not even funny,” Tara said fifteen minutes later as she deposited her laptop on my desk, plugging the power cord into the wall. On top of it sat a pair of thick black wraparound glasses.

  I filed the CDs I’d burned with the week’s work away with the other backups, one in the collection organized by date, the other in the one organized by subject. “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth having backed up. Why are you plugging that in? The storm is almost on top of us.”

  We both were silent while another flash-boom! shook the house.

  “I don’t get a good connection to log on to the system on the battery. It’s just to log on. Once you’re into the game, you can unplug it. Here is the VR unit. Cool, huh? Looks just like a pair of shades. There’re speakers built into the part of the glasses that sits behind your ears, so you hear everything, and here”—she flipped down a fiber-optic-sized black extension from the sides of the glasses—“here is your microphone. The software has speech recognition capabilities, so you can talk to other characters just like you normally would. It’s so totally cool.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, trying to avoid her as she shoved the glasses toward my face, but it was useless. A few seconds later I was wearing the VR glasses. “I can’t see anything.”

  “They’re not turned on. Here, let me do it. Okay, you’re set. Gotta go do the rest of my homework before we lose the lights,” Tara called over her shoulder as she hurried out of the room. “It’s all set up for you to log on with a new name, and I told Bart to watch out for you. Oh, and I put you on the list of workers at my weavery, so you can look around there. Have fun!”

  “Hey! Don’t think I don’t see through your hit-and-run tactics! I know full well what you’re doing!” I sighed as her laughter spilled down the stairs after her. “Manipulative little so-and-so,” I muttered as I turned my attention to the colorful screen that seemed to float in the air before me.

  A game client screen that read “Welcome to Buckling Swashes. Please log in or create a new pirate to enter the game” blinked slowly at me.

  “Right. Let’s get this over with.” I reached out somewhat blindly for the keyboard, able to see only dark, vague shapes of the computer and desk behind the virtual images that danced before my eyes. “Name . . . Amy Stewart.”

  “That’s supposed to be your pirate name, not your real name,” came a slightly tinny, ethereal voice drifting from the heating duct in the wall.

  “Do your homework and stop listening at the heater,” I yelled, backspacing over my name. “Pirate name. I don’t have a pirate name. Um . . .” I tipped the glasses down my nose and looked around the room for inspiration, my eyes lighting on a Van Gogh print. “Earless . . . er . . . Erika. That sounds very piratical.”

  I typed in the pirate name, picked a few character traits (female, blond, with a short bob, and a Rubenesque, curvy body type that most closely matched my own). As I was about to click the CREATE PIRATE button, a tremendous crash of thunder hit simultaneously with a blinding flash of lightning. Upstairs, Tara shrieked as a second crash rocked the house. The lights flickered into a brownout. Mindful of the cost of her laptop, I leaned across the computer and grabbed the power cord at the same time another flash of lightning struck. As I pulled the plug free, a blue arc of electricity shot from the outlet, connecting with me at the same time another deafening roar of thunder shook the house.

  I must have hit the RETURN button as I jerked with the flow of electricity through my body, because the last thing I remember seeing before I sank into an abyss of darkness was a little spinning sign on the game screen saying “Entering Buckling Swashes. . . .”

  Chapter 2

  Here we live and reign alone

  In a world that’s all our own.

  —Ibid, Act I

  It was the sheep snuffling my face that woke me up. I didn’t realize it was a sheep at first, not being in the habit of keeping sheep in my house, where my last conscious moment was, but when something moistly warm blew on my face, followed by a horrible stinky scent of wet wool, my eyes popped open and I beheld the unlovely face of a sheep staring down at me.

  “T’hell?” I said groggily, pushing the sheep face out of mine as I sat up, immediately regretting the latter action when the world spun around dizzily for a few seconds. As it settled into place I blinked at the hand I’d used to shove away the sheep—it tingled faintly, as if I had whacked my funny bone. I shook it a couple of times, the pins-and-needles feeling quickly fading . . . but that’s when my wits returned.

  “What the hell?” I said again, a growing sense of disbelief and horror welling within me until I thought my head was going to explode.

  I used the rough wood wall behind me to help me get to my feet, my head still spinning a little as I looked around. I was in a short alley between two buildings, half-hidden behind a stack of what looked like whiskey barrels, the sheep who’d been snuffling me now engaged in rooting around through some garbage that slopped over from a wooden box. Sunlight filtered down through the overhang of the two buildings, spilling onto a lumpy cobblestone street behind the alley. Vague blurs resolved themselves into the images of people passing back and forth past the opening of the alley.

  The game . . . the virtual reality game. I was seeing images from the game. I put my hand up to my face to pull off the VR glasses, but all my fingers found were my glasses-less face. Had they gotten knocked off when I got the shock from the computer? If so, why was I still seeing the virtual world? I lurched my way forward down the alley, stumbling once or twice as my legs seemed to relearn how to walk.

  “What the . . . hell?” As I burst out into the open, I staggered to a stop.

  Two men in what I though of as typical pirate outfits—breeches, jerkins, swords strapped to their hips, and bandanas on their heads—walked by, one giving me a leer as I clutched the corner of the nearest building.

  Beyond them, a wooden well served as a gathering place for several women in long skirts and leather bodices, each armed with a wooden bucket or two. Pigs, sheep, chickens, dogs . . . they all wandered around the square, adding to the general sense of confusion and (at least on my part) disbelief.

  A couple of children clad in what could only be described as rags ran past me, each clutching an armful of apples. A shout at the far end of the square pierced the general babble, what appeared to be a greengrocer in breeches and a long apron evidently just noticing the theft of some apples.

  It was like something out of a movie. A period movie. One of those big MGM costume movies of the 1950s where everything was brightly colored and quasi-authentic. I expected Gene Kelly to burst singing from a building at any minute.

  Instead of Gene, two men emerged from a one-story building across the square, both staggering and yelling slurred curses. One man shoved the other one. The second man shoved the first one back. Both pulled out
swords and commenced fighting. The first man lunged. The second screamed, clutched his chest, and fell over backward into a stack of grain sacks. The first man yanked his sword out, spit on his downed opponent, and staggered away around the back of the building, wiping his bloody sword on the hem of his filthy open-necked shirt. A wooden sign hanging over the door he passed waved gently in the wind—a sign depicting a couple of mugs being knocked together beneath the words INN COGNITO printed in blocky letters.

  No one bustling around the square gave the dead man so much as a second look.

  “What the hell?” I shouted, goose bumps of sheer, unadulterated horror rippling along my arms and legs as I ran toward the body lying sprawled on the dirty grain sacks. I was about to go into serious freak-out mode when I remembered that none of this was real—it might look real and sound real, but it was just a game. No one had actually been murdered in front of me. It was just a bunch of computer sprites and sprockets and all those other techno-geeky things that I didn’t understand. “Okay, stay calm, Amy. This is not a real emergency. However, I’m not willing to lose points or bonus power chips or whatever this game hands out for acts above and beyond the norm. Let’s approach this as a non-life-threatening emergency, and go for the next power level. Yeargh. How on earth did they manage that?”

  As I squatted next to the dead man, the stench from his unwashed body hit me. I pushed away the skitter of repugnance as it rippled down my back, and rummaged around the dusty recesses of my brain for any knowledge of first-aid techniques. “Thank God for all of those first-aid classes I arranged when Tara was in middle school. Let me think—a sword wound. CPR?”

  A glance at the sluggishly seeping hole in his chest had me eliminating that option. There was no way putting pressure on that would help matters. “Mouth-to-mouth?”

  The man’s smell took care of that as a choice. “Hmm. Maybe I should apply a splint?”

  I looked around for something to act as a splint but didn’t see any handy splintlike boards, not to mention I wasn’t absolutely certain that a splint was a suitable treatment for a sword wound. “Okay. What’s left? Er . . . raise his feet higher than his head? Yeah, that sounds good. That should stop the flow of blood or something. Inhibits shock, I think.”