“It’s okay,” Jon’s therapist said. “They’re gone. Just breathe.”
Tears came to Jon’s eyes, fogging up his smart specs; he took the glasses off, and the AI therapist slipped out of view. He flung his backpack against the concrete wall.
He was taking shallow breaths, so he made an effort to slow and deepen his breathing.
When he put his glasses back on, they notified him he was two minutes late for History, building B, classroom 12. He picked up his backpack, said, “I’m not feeling well,” to his specs, and headed home. In the background, his therapist informed the school and his parents, and purchased one tram ticket for him.
On the ride home, he watched the city in the tram’s window passing by, buildings, people, trees, materializing and disappearing frame by frame, and he thought of them the way he liked to think about everything: in matters of optimized CPU cycles, in graphics shaders, in the processing power made available once these complex geometries slipped out of view.
#
Jon’s home system booted up when he entered his room; he shook off his coat, wiggled out of his pants, and jumped straight into the geodesic. His specs turned black, covering his entire field of view.
And the Welt replaced the world.
A gigantic library of apps and games rushed by Jon as he flew from one folder to another, propelling himself with the jets on his arms. He reached the corner of his Welt library where the unofficially-supported custom-built apps resided.
And in this dark corner hovered an icon. Two crossed rifles beneath a green helmet: Patch v.0.89.
It was time, Jon thought, to release it, unleash it, unfinished, imperfect, warts and all. It was time. He grabbed the icon and shoved it in his pouch.
His therapist appeared. “Are you sure this is what you want, Jon?”
“They have to pay.”
“Revenge is not the answer. You need to work through your anger. A poison only one can drink, remember?”
But Jon waved the therapist away from his space, and holding onto his pouch, he launched Brutal Assault.
Orange sky over yellow sand. Rounded, baked-earth huts scattered along the horizon. And people—players, avatars crowned with green nametags—wading through sand, cartoon faces leering at an unreal world.
He waited in a canteen. Waited for them to be out of school and into the Welt, into Brutal Assault.
It was some hours later that the three of them appeared. They walked to his table.
“Qedon,” the first of his bullies said. “We’re sorry we’re late. Hope you didn’t wait long.”
Qedon—Jon’s avatar—shook his head. “Just arrived myself,” he said, voice made gruffer through modulation software. He gestured at the chairs and the three bullies sat around him. He patted his pouch, “I have your code.” Three pairs of eyes widened simultaneously. This was it, Jon thought. Months of tracking down the virtual identities of his real-life bullies, of scheming, coding, all of it leading up to this. “Now all I need is your guarantee, gentlemen.”
The three nodded and each proffered a hand, concluding a silence agreement between Jon’s and their Welt accounts, ensuring they’d never criss-cross and the system would keep them apart, whether in Brutal Assault or in any of the myriad other world-openings.
Handing over the pouch, “And so it is yours.” Their greedy hands took what they thought was a piece of cheatware for spicing up the loot dropped in the game’s dungeons, and the three avatars gobbled it up. “Good game,” Jon said, and walked out of the canteen.
Logged out from the Welt, he extricated himself out of the geodesic and fell to his knees, sobbing.
It was done.
#
The following morning, he didn’t see the bullies in school: their desks stood empty during Programming class. At first recess, they were nowhere to be found.
It worked! Jon was overjoyed. It was all worth it. The footage of real-life carnage and secret war films he’d leeched from dark corners of the Web, patched into Brutal Assault code, had shocked them, terrified them, made them piss their pants, and they were now probably trembling in their beds with real thousand yard stares on their pimply faces. Everything was more real in virtual reality—and mere glimpses of this war footage had given Jon nightmares—so he could only imagine what these visual atrocities had done to the three bullies when faced with them all of a sudden.
He ate his lunch in the schoolyard, when somebody shoved him and he almost stumbled to the ground.
“Outta the way, prick.”
“Ha ha ha.”
“Eat your slop, oink, oink.”
The bullies cackled, laughed, shouted, grimaced at him, seeming unscathed. The last one to pass slapped him on the ear, which left it buzzing, before they all disappeared into building B.
Sensing shock, his therapist appeared. “What’s the matter, Jon?”
But he was too caught up, crying in a corner by the lockers. Finally he managed to say, “How?” He stuttered, “I don’t understand.”
The therapist considered this. “You can’t fight fire with fire, Jon.”
“But, but—it didn’t affect them at all.” The horrible war images flashed before him and he shuddered. It didn’t make sense. “I don’t understand,” he repeated.
In his ear, she whispered, “You don’t understand, because you don’t understand them. For starters, you seem to believe that they are like you.”
It took a moment for her words to sink in, but when they did, he said, “Yes.” He wiped off his tears. “Yes, yes, yes.”
By the end of the day, Jon was feeling a little bit better.
—
Damien Krsteski writes fiction and develops software, and some of his stories have appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Metaphorosis, Future Fire, and others. Originally from the Balkans, he now lives and works in Germany.
