NEWS - MISSING: 19-Year-Old Comp Sci Undergrad

“We’re running out of time.” 

I nudged Johnny with my foot. The heat of the sun had been drumming delirium into the back of my head for the past - very expensive - three hours, and the strength of my kick came out so poorly calculated that Johnny almost teetered off his feet.

Johnny squatted next to the casket in front of us. A green goo was oozing from it, pooling around his boots.

He shielded his eyes from the sun to stare up at me, then thrusted up an arm, “buy more.” 

I heaved an exasperated sigh, about to hit him with a mouthful of accounting, when a hefty splatter of green goo launched itself off his nails and dropped, with a sizzle, on my charcoal combat boots. I winced, as if the boots weren't two inches thick, and their rustic press-stud buckles had not already rendered my nerves a defunct and sedated mash of flesh. I grabbed his outstretched arm. His bangles and beaded bracelets, which spelled out various basketball teams, one shouting W.W.J.D. in bright yellow letters, slid to a stop at his elbow. What I held was not skin, but an intricately carved sheathing, and if I remembered correctly, its loops and bumps of abstract faces and weaponry depicted the Greek myth of a dead Sisyphus cheating Death. On less stressful days, I would have teasingly reminisced how Johnny first told us of the story - how “Sisyphus pulled an Uno card on Death.” 

With an arm still bent behind him, Johnny maneuvered a booster clamp into a tight gap on the side of the casket, the territorial spurting of green ooze getting more hostile with each tentative prod of his. 

I found the small latch on his lower forearm and slid it open, revealing the portable display monitor fitted into his sheathing. I tilted it away from the sun (eliciting a pained yelp from Johnny) to see the flickering numbers on the matchbox-sized screen, and just as I estimated, his remaining balance was a humble ten dollars and forty cents. That would get us around four more minutes, if you factored in the transaction costs. Feeling hopeless, I wanted to throw Johnny’s arm onto the ground like a cigarette butt, and habit could not have ensured that I didn't stomp on his fingers immediately after too. 

I swiped through the tiny screen to check on Johnny’s vitals on his Energy Tab. 

The Rural Models we were playing in barely passed through verification when we logged into Rhoamed Realm this morning. We had to practically force ourselves through the Dock, Johnny and my hips borderline conjoined in order to pass under one Sojourner Ticket. 

Our Models were Rural patented, Rural managed, and “for in-Rural use only.” Well, warning labels become mere advice when the life of your childhood friend is on the line. Rural was our go-to turf, a friendlier, scaled-down version of Rhoamed Realm. We were content with Rural, at least Johnny and I were. Kalinda, on the other hand, had the budget, and although she would never admit it, the unhealthy compulsion to demand more. 

Rhoamed Realm did not support our bodies, or rather, we did not have the devices to complement it. So no matter how many layers of coded barriers and insulators we had tucked into the Rural Models we were now romping around in, they could not guard us against the aches Rhoamed Realm has sent roiling through our bodies.

As far as I was concerned, our cheaper Models were like alka seltzers, and we were slowly but steadily disintegrating in the pulsing atmosphere of this world - this virtual world of massive inherited allowances, oven-baked sunlight, and impeccable recreations of natural landscaping. 

“You don’t have enough money left. I’ll use mine. I think I’ll have enough to postpone ejection until thirty more minutes.”

Johnny looked up at me, defeated. “Thanks,” he looked back at his work, “I guess it’s double shifts on weekends now.”

“Triple shifts,” I muttered.

The casket was fogged up evenly, but not thick enough to hide the black shadow lying dormant inside. There were no tattletale puffs of misting indicating any signs of life, and the top of the casket was melded so seamlessly into the box bottom that I bet not even a singular grain of sand could penetrate it. 

I missed Kalinda’s voice. Her combat skills, her high rank that could get us into any Tier 1 Internet Café we wanted, even on the busiest of weekends. I missed her pink emoticon blinking on my phone, asking me if she could bring over the jambalaya she made over the weekend. 

We’ve tried hacking the casket with an industrial power drill, bought from Rhoamed Realm Retail. We’ve expedited Kalinda’s activity history to Rhoamed Realm Customer Service, the State Department of Virtual Reality and Technology, the Gamer’s Institute, and to obscure coders on the dark web, begging them to figure out a way to reverse her actions. We’ve enclosed promises of large sums in our pleas, but all of them either did not know what to do, or simply didn’t care. 

We’ve broken open Kalinda’s Dock, the one gifted to her by her dad when she turned 18. It stood regally in the corner of her room, and it was - unlike most of Kalinda’s belongings - cleansed and polished, obviously babied. 

Speaking of Kalinda’s room, we've been camping out there for almost two months, and every day of freeloading was getting harder and harder to explain to her widowed mother. Sierra Davenport simply did not believe in the powers of virtual reality. To her, her daughter was as good as dead, probably in a ditch, “with a ring from a drug lord.” However, apart from a subsistent amount of Subway coupons and belly piercing discounts donated by Kalinda’s unlikely gamer friends, we have been depressingly fruitless in proving her wrong.

My portable display monitor, a twin of the one planted in Johnny’s forearm, was strapped to my waistband, and I pulled it out, its retractable line bouncing off my hip. My lips curled in disgust as I studied my account balance. A familiar zero stared wide eyed at me. As innocent as a bankruptcy. 

Hm.

Oh, no!

What in the world should I do?

Tongue in my cheek, I typed in my mother’s full name. 

Then her credit card number. 

I’ve done this multiple times. She doesn’t notice. She won’t ever if it’s just one last time. 

A few seconds later, my screen blipped. Transaction complete: enjoy Rhoamed Realm. Join the last Pankration Games of the season tonight- “Easy,” I said, triumphant. 

The sun was slanting. The sky turned into swaths of oranges and pinks. The postcard quality of it all touched me in a way that I haven’t felt in years. I took a deep breath, as deep as the musty, over-perspired air inside my helmet allowed. I felt excitement, disbelief, followed by an intense gratefulness, and then there: the desire to change myself once and for all. Again. 

After pouring all my money into this rescue mission, leaving me unable to pay for my tuition upfront, I have postponed my deposit, and whatever comes of today will decide whether I choose to stay or re-enroll at community college, back home. 

I wanted to swallow sand.

“Today is the last day" - hacking at the casket with a mallet - “that we can try,” said Johnny, a dejected groan threatening to erupt from the back of his throat, “if either of us wants to see her again.” 

His hammering intensified. 

A month ago, after Kalinda made headlines (“Teen Disappearance, Last Seen…In Her Room?”), journalists, trying to stand out on the newsstands, have decided to test the hypothesis that Rhoamed Realm, “20 year-old Kalinda D. Davenport’s daily escape and creative refuge,” was the unsuspected perpetrator all along. This theory stuck. Since then, competing virtual gaming companies, anti-tech societies, and Gamers Anonymous chapters around the world have been protesting for the immediate suspension of Rhoamed Realm, “before it swallows the real world whole” - writes one columnist. 

Well, much to their satisfaction, Rhoamed Realm had announced a system re-evaluation with the intent of “maintaining player welfare and security”. The reboot was scheduled for the end of this week. After tomorrow, Rhoamed Realm will be officially suspended, indefinitely.

I pulled out my monitor again, clicked into Player Time. 

18:22. 

Eighteen minutes to save the world. 

All it mattered to Rhoamed Realm was to quell the media hellfire that they were in right now. They didn't seem to care that their highly anticipated wipeout would only obliterate Kalinda to pieces.

There was one more day of playing time left for the three plus million diehard Rhoamed Realm junkies in the world. My heart went out to them. Few would be able to adjust to this sudden change. If Rural suffered the same fate, I wouldn’t know what I’d do. Would I have to start going out for walks? 

Horrifying. 

I knelt down next to Johnny.

I would love to help, but the code that was blazing across a monitor, now connected to the clamps he had successfully wedged into the casket, were Greek to me. Passing up computer science camp in the ninth grade was a legitimate regret.

I looked at the plaque on the casket instead. On it, in a strict little Roman font, was etched “sewerkandy078,” with three lines of numbers underneath. I had deduced that the first number, “71,” was her "Pank Rank", Kalinda's ranking in the brutal free-for-all battle game in Rhoamed Realm called “Pankration.” 

The other statistics were alien to my meek Rural knowledge, but I would recognize “sewerkandy078” anywhere. It was Kalinda’s gamertag. 

I remembered Kalinda in the eighth grade, passing out the sour patches, fizzy rope, and E-MA throat lozenges that she had filled to the brim of her thermos with. During a painstakingly long math class, her contraband will slowly make rounds around the classroom, feeding her spiritually dead peers. 

“How much time, Farrah?” Johnny asked. A smile was hesitant on his reserved expression, but it was, nevertheless, a smile. 

“You’ve got it?” I couldn’t hide the optimism in my voice. I rushed to check my monitor, “eight minutes.” 

The light from the connected monitor turned green in Johnny's hands. Then white again. Brows furrowed, he swiped something across it.

I expected the lid of the casket to lift itself with a whoosh, releasing streams of smoke to present Kalinda as if she were a freshly steamed xiao long bao in a bamboo basket. 

“Why isn’t it opening? Are we in the way?” I asked, stepping back for emphasis, “Do we have to open it ourselves?” 

I gawked at Johnny’s stoic face. 

Silence. 

I went over to the casket, wrapped my fingers around its thick lid, and pulled. But like the other thousand times we've tried it, it didn't budge.

I could almost hear the Earth rotating. I think somewhere in the neighborhood a big bang happened. 

Finally, Johnny held up the monitor and beckoned me closer.

He pressed a button. 

I watched him do it. 

We waited.

We waited again.

Nothing. 

The casket stood unbothered as a sculpture.

Kalinda laid as dead...as a girl in a casket.

My gaze on the dark shadow inside the casket was so intense that my vision started to shake. 

My head seemed to be splitting. I didn't realize how dark it had become until I saw that my arms were fully extended in front of me, pawing blindingly for Johnny, a tree, a stoplight, Kalinda, I did not know what. 

Tears slipped down my face. Snot dripped off my chin. Have we failed? But I wasn’t really…crying, my mind was as clear as the black sky above me. I hadn’t registered what I was mourning over yet. 

Johnny’s eyes were ablaze, “No, no, no, this code's got to work, Farrah. We need more time.”

My own monitor beeped from my waist. I felt for it with lazy arms. 

5:00. 

“Johnny, we’ve got to go,” I said, or rather, I thought I said. I couldn’t hear my own voice. I realized that I was deaf. 

No, I was not deaf. 

In the few minutes we spent transfixed on the casket, Rhoamed Realm had erupted into a cacophony of rumbles and stomps, and as the emptiness of my mind gauged my bearings, abrupt and eerie chirrups sliced through my eardrums like feedback from a cheap KTV speaker.  

Suddenly, something materialized, almost out of thin air. 

My eyes grew wide. A black bird. Wings the size of two oriental rugs. Talons that could crush a fridge. I squinted at its inky black beak as it flew over us, a good thirty feet away, and that’s when I saw the holographic gold garland above its head. The light from the insignia was what had allowed me to separate it from the pitch black sky in the first place. 

The insignia was a garland of parsley leaves. In the middle of it was a number: 59. 

The bird circled again.

Its wings lifted to catch an upcoming draft, and in doing so revealed to me the foreboding warning flickering at the bottom of the garland.

Pankration. 

My blood chilled.

Kalinda got herself killed in Pankration.

“Johnny! We’ve got to go!” My yell tore through me, like an unhealed line of stitches being ripped out of bloody flesh. Johnny was doubled over in pain, his hands over his ears. 

“What is that?” Johnny yelled. 

Ignoring him, I knelt down and started unearthing our Dock from a sand pile - which had formed in the desert winds while we worked. 

A Dock is the only way to enter and exit Rhoamed Realm. For Sojourners, one-time visitors like us, a Dock was an 18 inch black disk with two footprint-shaped cavities on one side and the letters RR emblazoned on the other. 

My monitor beeped. 

The edge of the disk appeared, and Johnny lugged it out as I turned to prep our exit on my monitor. The disk chimed responsively as Johnny tapped in numbers on its screen. 

The sounds around us forced their way into my focus again. It was an animalistic remix of the gongs in Chinese temples and of boulders crashing into dams.

I took off my helmet and slipped it over Johnny’s head, hoping that it’ll block out some of the noise.

We hopped onto the disk. I wrapped my arms around Johnny’s waist, pressing him close to me. He brought in his elbows to rest them over my shoulders, his arms behind my neck. The weight of his sheathings sunk into my deltoids.

Both of us have to fit on one single disk, since we came for the price of one player. Fumbling, I slotted my boots into the grooves on the disk. It held me in place.

Another beep from my monitor, and a cylindrical beam erupted from the circumference of the disk, shooting upwards into the sky. 

I saw a flash of black.

“Three,” announced the disk in a robotic voice. 

I tensed, waiting to be knocked out and released from Rhoamed Realm.

Suddenly, the wind stopped. Tufts of my hair, which were whirling around my face and prying their way into my mouth half a second ago, now drifted down like flower petals to rest on my chest. I started, “What-”

“Two.” 

The bird screeched, and my head snapped up just in time to catch its murderous white eyes meet mine - all before the air broke free and erupted into a sandstorm. The bird was plummeting towards us like a meteorite. 

I closed my eyes in terror.

Fingers clawing at Johnny’s upper back, I screamed as what felt like a thousand pine leaves dragged itself across my downturned face. A gust of feathers slinked over my arms. I tasted blood as a scaly hook cracked against my jaw. Something sharp grabbed onto my hair, yanking me against my unrelenting boots. My ankles were about to pop out of their sockets when my hold on Johnny faltered, and all of a sudden, his weight on my shoulders disappeared. 

Johnny, hold on, I wanted to scream, but then the darkness hit. 

* * *

I opened my eyes. The leg of Kalinda's desk was an inch away from my face.

Why am I on the floor? 

I rolled away from the desk leg and tried to get to my feet, but the pain in my ankles made me crumble back onto the floor with a confused gasp. 

It was dark inside Kalinda's room, but I could see the bluish glow of dawn through the blinds.

I was so dehydrated that my head felt like cement. My throat felt like sandpaper.

Did I drink yesterday? 

In a trancelike state, I surveyed Kalinda’s room. Everything was in place. I thought I heard a commotion…something had woken me.

Was it a nightmare?

My eyes stopped at Kalinda’s Dock. The sleek cylindrical body of it looked like a large luminous tampon. 

Something wasn’t right with it. On a hook protruding from the side of the Dock, I saw a small patch of graffiti on the wall behind it.

I've never studied the drawing, because my helmet always covered it, I thought. As it was where I always hang my Rural helmet. 

Where is my helmet?

And that’s when I remembered everything.