Free Luminarium by Alex Shakar Page A

mouse more or less continually, swiveling the view back and forth and up and down through the courtyard, a fuzzy, green circle of night-vision visibility sliding over the broken windows, kicked-in doors, and a narrow alley between two low buildings where a third soldier stood facing the other way. Watching the lifelike kick of the guns, the near-photorealistic chinks and eruptions from the bullet-riddled walls, Fred felt what he did every time he came in here: a dizzy mixture of liberation and oppression, adventure and drear constriction.
    “ Holomelancholia ,” he remembered George pronouncing late in the office one night. “The inevitable disappointment of virtual worlds.” Pleased at his invention, he’d allowed himself a rueful smile. “Mark my words. It’ll be in the DSM by 2021.”
    “Fred,” Sam stated, by way of greeting. It spooked the newer employees, this ability of his to tell who was behind him without having to turn and check. The trick lay in the reflectivity of the aluminum head of his desk lamp, which he used as a kind of rearview mirror. “I’m trying to cover you,” he growled almost subvocally into his headset mic.
    Fred heard Jesse curse from across the room as Little Jesse fell backward in the courtyard. Where the bridge of his nose had been was now a flattened well, out of which green-lit blood seeped over his face and onto the ground.
    “What the hell …” A wave of unreality lifted Fred in his shoes. He couldn’t double-check what he thought he’d seen because Sam kept shifting the view around.
    “Where’s it coming from?” Sam hissed into the mic, hunching closer to the screen.
    “Was Jesse’s nose blown off?” Fred asked.
    Sam joggled and clicked, too busy to answer. Interspersed with the popping gunfire, a pleading voice which might have been their lead animator Conrad’s emanated from Sam’s earpiece. Little Sam turned into the gateway and fired off a grenade into a second-story window across the street. Then came a flash, a thunderclap, a hail of stone and smoke. As Little Sam backed into the courtyard, the canned sounds of a woman screaming and a child crying.
    “That wasn’t the one you said?” Sam called out. Bullets began chipping away the wall around him. He swiveled. The soldier by the alley was down. Something moved back into the darkness. Another explosion, this one making the whole screen flash, and then convert to black and white, the indicator-of-death feature they’d cribbed from Dungeons & Dragons Online. Little Sam was down, blackened, missing an arm. Definitely. Missing an arm. Blood oozing from the stump. For a while, neither Fred nor Sam could take their eyes off Little Sam, whose soot-caked face bore Sam’s own sunken cheeks, prominent nose, vacantly staring eyes.
    “Yeah,” Sam said, eyeing Fred in the lamp hood. “Whole new level of avatar deformability. It’s like a real game now.”
    Fred nodded, that underwater feeling coming on.
    “Still a ways to go,” Sam went on, with minimal affect. “They want full, persistent human physiology now. Cumulative trauma, wounds that can slow you down, cripple and kill you over days. Hunger and thirst shriveling you up like a prune. Smallpox hives, neurotoxin tremors. Radiation. That’s the big one. Sores on the skin. Hair and teeth falling out …” On some level, Fred thought, Sam must have known the effect this singsong list was having on him. The increasingly deformable avatars had been getting steadily harder for Fred to stomach, a development he blamed less on the improving technology than on witnessing George’s increasingly deformable body over the last year—rashes and burns, sutures and scars, IV punctures, bloody gobs coughed into wads of tissues or pumped out of him through silicone tubes. At Sam’s mention of hair falling out, what flashed to mind was that first shock of going to George’s apartment and finding his head shaved smooth. George had begun losing his hair and so had decided