It had been thirteen weeks since Justin received his last Shadow World news alert. Eight killings in four months, and then nothing. No stabbed or strangled avatars discarded in the alleys or in the back rooms of bars or in dirty Lincoln Avenue motel rooms. Justin hadn’t played the game at all in two months except to check in on his avatar and to celebrate his Shadow mother’s birthday.
Tuesday morning, dressed for school in jeans and a black T-shirt, he poured dry cereal in a bowl and pawed through the mess of bills and home magazines and catalogs on the kitchen counter.
“What are you looking for, hon?” Martha asked.
“The paper,” Justin mumbled.
“The Tempo section is on the table there,” she said.
Justin kept shoving aside piles of old paper. “Nuh-uh. The front page.”
Martha sighed. “You shouldn’t read this stuff. You get so worked up.” She opened a baseboard cabinet where she kept the big pots and removed the folded Tribune section. “But I guess I can’t keep it from you. The radio, the television, the Internet. God knows what you talk about in school.”
Justin sat down and flattened the paper on the table. The headline read: DAMEN AVENUE DEATH
Cops say woman, 23, could be first Wicker Man victim in six months
Justin read the story quickly. She was found behind a French restaurant. Strangled and stabbed. Raped. Body left in the rain. No prints, no DNA. Police guessed time of death was between 2 and 4 a.m. Justin agreed: it was the Wicker Man, all right.
The story continued with as many details about the victim as they could gather. She was from downstate. A student at DePaul. She had eaten at the restaurant with friends earlier in the evening. None of them were considered suspects. Not much more than that. This edition had been distributed electronically (and printed directly in the homes of subscribers on large-format paper), but the reporter still would have had only an hour or so to file the story.
At the end of the article was an editorial note in italics: “Sally Barwick helped with the reporting on this story.”
Hunh.
He put on his coat and kissed his mother good-bye. “Finish your cereal, you have time,” she said.
“Gotta be in early today,” he told her as the kitchen door shut behind him. “There’s a science lab I need to finish before class.”
Martha sighed. She felt certain that was a lie.
When he’d gone three blocks on his bike, Justin turned right where he should have turned left and circled back to Stone Avenue. The last few mornings he worried he had been looking at the wrong window. What if Dr. Moore had left him the signal days or weeks ago and he’d missed it somehow? He paused his bike a few houses down and scanned every upstairs window, eight of them across the face of the large Prairie home. In the upper-right quadrant, underneath a flat, protruding eave, there was a window separated into eight panes. A piece of white paper had been taped inside the bottom left pane and the curtains behind it had been pulled shut.
Justin picked his feet off the ground and propelled himself forward. Finally. The waiting had been horrible. With no word from Dr. Moore and nothing going on in Shadow World, his life for the last few weeks had been practically suspended.
He endured his morning classes – English, calculus, history – and rushed across the main building to get to fourth-period computer science early. He was only the sixth person to arrive. Now he just had to remember which boxes were still live with the game.
Shadow World had become so popular that Northwood East (and hundreds of other schools across the country) had to ban students from playing it during school hours. It was too big a distraction. Teachers tried to be diligent about deleting the software from hard drives and networks on campus, but the kids wanted to play more than the teachers wanted to stop them, and Justin could almost always find a machine with an undetected installation. He sat in the back left seat and searched the computer there. Nothing. He slid over to the next chair and tried again. This time he found it in a hidden folder, nested deep in the directory and renamed “HISTOR~.” An indifferent teacher conducting a half-assed search would never have found it.
The students were mostly in their seats now. They were supposed to be working on independent programming projects, so their teacher, Mrs. Biden (too old to know how to do anything useful on a computer, the students all agreed), made a few brief announcements and then urged them to work quietly, as she always did. Justin had already finished his assignment, or nearly anyway, and he called it up on the screen so he could switch to it in a keystroke if someone walked behind him. Then he logged on.
The game downloaded the time from a government lab, consulted his schedule, and figured out he should be in this classroom. Fourth period was an hour long, followed by lunch, which was also an hour. He had a forty-minute study hall for sixth period and had already put in a request to spend his free period here in the computer room. That meant he had two and a half hours. He hoped it would be enough.
Typing every word he wanted his avatar to speak (at school he couldn’t use the headset or the teachers would bust him in a second), Shadow Justin told his Shadow teacher he wasn’t feeling well, and she excused him to the nurse’s office. His avatar ducked out the doors by the gym and took a shortcut through the woods toward downtown Northwood, jogging along a path of mud and dead grass. An early snow had covered the ground a week before but it had melted from even moderately traveled places and the game reflected the messy result even along this out-of-the-way trail. He couldn’t risk getting his bike from the rack. Someone in the game would see him. Looking around the room he guessed there were three others playing at the same time, and their online alter egos were no doubt skipping out on school as well.
In fifteen minutes he was on a train headed into the city. Other suburbs rolled past as the light midday ridership boarded and disembarked. At Northwestern station he got off the train and passed an arcade on Washington. He wondered what it would be like to go inside and play a coin-operated video game through his computer. Some other day.
Speed was the thing, so Justin hailed a cab and took it to Tribune Tower, just north of the Chicago River. The sidewalk in front of the Gothic stone building on the east side of Michigan Avenue was active with reporters and other workers from the paper returning from the field or heading out to lunch. Twin revolving doors, framed in glass and wood and set inside the elaborately carved stone edifice, sucked men and women into the building at the same rate they pushed them out.
The lobby was several stories high and the walls lined with a variety of reflective stones. A security guard sat at a marble half-moon desk, checking people as they came in. Two banks of elevators were behind them, and over the elevators was an engraved quote from Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the first publisher of the Tribune.
“Guard, I’m here to see Sally Barwick,” Justin typed when he came to the front of the short line. “She’s expecting me.” That was a lie.
“Your name?” the guard asked.
“Justin Finn.”
The guard touched a directory screen in front of him. “Sally Barwick. She’s on the fourth floor. Let me call up and see if she can come get you.” He appeared to be listening to the phone ring over the handset, and he waved Justin aside so he could help the next person. If Sally wasn’t playing the game at the moment, he would no doubt tell Justin to come back later. No good.
The elevator dinged and a half dozen people stepped off while a crowd of avatars pushed forward, preparing to squeeze in. Shadow Justin quietly joined them and the back of the guard’s head was pinched away by the closing elevator doors.
It took only a few minutes of navigating the paths between cubicles up and down the fourth-floor newsroom to find Sally’s desk. Her avatar was typing diligently at her keyboard, working on a story.
“Sally?” Justin said.
Shadow Sally looked up. She didn’t appear to recognize him. “I’m sorry. I’m very busy. Perhaps you can come back later and we can talk.” A programmed response. Weird.
If she was signed out of the game, her avatar should have been gray and lethargic. When a person was logged off, the player’s avatar went on auto-pilot, performing typical functions in a robotic torpor. If, in Shadow World, the person had a job in a cotton-ball factory, the avatar would continue to make cotton balls in the player’s absence. A player could leave simple instructions – take the five-fifteen train, make a TV dinner, go to bed at eleven – and until the player returned to the game, the avatar would have minimal contact with other players. It would even turn a washed-out blue color so others would know that interaction was discouraged. Sally’s avatar had a normal complexion, but clearly real Sally wasn’t in control.
Justin typed, “Sally, will you be coming online for lunch?”
“That’s impossible to say,” Shadow Barwick said. “If you would like to leave me a note, I will see it when I am less busy.”
“Sally, fine,” Justin typed. He found a piece of paper and a pencil on her desk and wrote:
SALLY, I’M AT THE BILLY GOAT. PLEASE MEET ME. I’LL BE THERE UNTIL 1 P.M. JUSTIN
Sally acknowledged the note when he set it in front of her, but the avatar did not read it. Instead she went back to typing an imaginary article about an imaginary subject no one would ever read.
Justin rode the elevator back down to the street and walked past the security guard, who seemed unconcerned that he’d lost track of Justin only a few minutes before. He must be a program-operated character, Justin thought. The program lets you get away with much. Real players do not.
He crossed the street, descended a concrete staircase to Lower Michigan Avenue, and walked into the Billy Goat Tavern. He ordered a hamburger, chips, and a cola and found a wobbly table with a view of the door.
The real Billy Goat wasn’t much to look at, and the Shadow Billy Goat reflected that. A long L-shaped bar had been built along two walls, and several televisions hung above it, showing highlights from last night’s Bulls game. The chairs were the institutional kind, with hollow aluminum frames and vinyl seats and backs with a faux wood finish. The linoleum floor was old and dirty. Frames on the walls held photographs, some autographed, of the Shadow Billy Goat’s celebrity patrons. These celebrities fell into three categories – people who were famous in the real world but mostly unknown inside Shadow World; people who led anonymous lives in the real world but who had become famous inside Shadow World; and people who were famous in the real world as well as in Shadow World. Most of those in this last group were True-to-Lifers, extreme celebrity egotists who were unsatisfied with the adoration they received from actual people. They needed the love and attention of a whole other universe. Some of them were intriguing, however, like the current and popular Chicago news anchorwoman whose Shadow World character had left journalism to become a world-famous concert cellist. Now that was cool, Justin thought.
Back in his seat at school, the bell rang and the other students hurried out the door toward the cafeteria. Justin stretched, but hardly anyone noticed that he lingered behind. It wasn’t unusual for students to work in the computer lab through the lunch period, and few of his classmates were close enough to young Justin to care what he had planned for the noon meal. Alone, he turned his attention back to the game.
He was through with his burger and about to open his bag of chips when Shadow Sally walked through the door. She stood at the top of the steps and looked around. When she located Justin she nodded, but she didn’t look happy to see him.
“Justin, a little young to be in a bar by yourself in the middle of the afternoon, aren’t you?” she said.
“Sally, in the real world maybe,” Shadow Justin said. “They’re pretty lax about that here in the game.”
She sat down and nudged two fingers inside Justin’s bag of chips. “What’s going on?” There was no one else within listening distance, so they could stop identifying each other by name. “You’re typing. Are you at school?” If she had a headset on, his voice would have sounded artificial, her computer reproducing his typed words in a flat, mechanical tone. Her spoken words, on the other hand, were spelled out across Justin’s monitor in subtitles.
“Yeah, it sucks,” Justin said. He attempted an awkward segue: “But you know, after all this time, I never had you pegged for a TTL.”
Sally didn’t reply for a moment and Justin wondered if he’d offended her. “No shame in being a True-to-Lifer, is there?”
“None whatsoever,” Justin agreed. “I was surprised, is all. I figured you were just a crime buff like me who got herself a job at a Shadow World newspaper.”
“I am, I guess,” Barwick said. “Except I got myself a job at a real-life newspaper first. How’d you find me out?”
“I saw your byline in the paper this morning.”
“And how’d you know I’d be logging on before one o’clock?”
“I figured a TTL wouldn’t let a lunch break go by without getting in the game.”
“Yeah,” Sally said. “I’m always terrified the program will let my avatar walk into traffic, or slip in front of the El or something. I need to be controlling her as much as possible.”
“When I saw you at your desk, your avatar looked live, but you weren’t there. How is that possible?”
Shadow Sally smiled. “Ancient Shadow World secret. An old TTL trick.”
“I don’t really understand True-to-Life play,” Justin confessed. “You’re just putting her through the motions of your own existence.”
“More or less,” she said. “But that’s the closest thing I can get to understanding the way others see me. That’s the goal of the game, as far as I’m concerned. A lot of people play it in order to create an idealized version of themselves, but I want Shadow Sally to be as much like the real me as possible. Through her, I can get a better handle on who I really am.”
“I’ve never heard a TTL put it that way, exactly,” Justin typed. “That’s kind of cool. I think about that stuff a lot – who I am versus who I think I am versus who other people think I am.”
Sally said, “Interested in the existential mysteries of life? I guess that’s normal for a fifteen-year-old. I forget what it was like to be that age sometimes. Still trying to figure it all out. Wondering what grown-ups know that you don’t.”
“Save me the trouble,” Shadow Justin said. “What do grown-ups know?”
“Not a damn thing. But you have a jones for philosophy? That’s good.”
“Yeah, my mom got me started on that stuff when I was a kid,” Justin wrote.
“Your mother? Why?”
“I don’t know.” Justin typed quickly, not wanting to bring up his shrink and generally trying to steer the subject away from his own life. “I think it’s kind of funny that you’re a True-to-Lifer, though, given some of the conversations we’ve had.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the Wicker Man. I’ve been suggesting since we hooked up in Shadow World that he might be a TTL, a guy who mirrors his real-life killing online.”
“Yeah, so? You think I’m him?” She was kidding, Justin was pretty sure.
“No, I don’t think you’re him. But why do you find my theory so implausible, considering you’re a True-to-Lifer yourself?”
“Because there are so many other explanations that make more sense, Justin. The correct explanation is almost always the simplest one.”
“Occam’s Razor, I know,” Justin typed.
“Huh?”
“William of Occam. Fourteenth-century Franciscan monk. The correct explanation is almost always the simplest one. He said that.” Justin wondered if he was coming across like a know-it-all. He frequently did in real life.
“You’re full of surprises,” Sally said. “It’s hot in here.” Temperature in the game was metered on-screen, and characters were expected to act accordingly – remove clothes, drink liquids – or they would start to get tired. Eventually avatars could become dehydrated and need to go to a Shadow emergency room.
Justin didn’t want to talk about the broken thermostat. “But why is it more likely that the Shadow World murders, or the ones most similar to the Wicker Man killings at least, are being done by a copycat, when we know that a quarter of the folks in Shadow World are True-to-Lifers like you? Why not explore the possibility that the Wicker Man is a gamer and he’s killing in both worlds?”
“Because we have no evidence of that beyond your crazy imagination. And even if it were true, Justin, how would we prove it? The Wicker Man hasn’t left any physical evidence in the real world. On a computer network he’d be a total phantom. No fingerprints, no DNA, no blood evidence.” She paused, as if she were hesitant to say the next thing. “Plus there’s another reason.”
“What?”
“The Wicker Man’s victims are posed, postmortem. The bodies in Shadow World aren’t.”
“Some of them looked kind of posed,” Justin said.
“No, the real Wicker Man victims have their legs spread wide apart, and the left hand is covering their left breast. Every one of them,” Sally said. “The cops have asked to keep that out of the papers so they don’t run up against copycats.”
Justin was undeterred. “Maybe he’s doing it slightly different in the game. I just think it’s worth looking into. If we find out who’s killing these girls in Shadow World, it might lead us to the real-life killer.”
Sally’s avatar covered her mouth but no titles showed up on Justin’s screen to indicate she was laughing. Maybe she was yawning. “Yes, I suppose that’s true.” She said. “Is this what you came all the way down here for? To argue this all over again now that you’ve found out I’m a TTL?”
“I’m in school,” Justin typed. “I’m bored.”
“Smart guy like you, I’m not surprised.”
“I have to go to my next class soon. I should head for the train.”
“Yeah, and my lunch break’s about over.”
“Sally, tell me something before I split,” Justin wrote. “If I had gone downtown in real life and left you a message that I was waiting for you across the street, would you have shown up?” As he typed he realized it sounded flirtatious and, given his age, presumptuous. He didn’t care.
Shadow Sally reached across the table and touched him on the shoulder. “‹ AGE INAPPROPRIATE› right, I would,” she wrote, turning his empty bag of chips inside out. “A girl’s gotta eat.”