The red message light on his screen had been flashing for an hour before it finally woke Justin from a vivid dream in which he was being chased by a cougar through the halls of his school. He rolled to the floor and thought for a moment that he would pull the blankets down on top of him and finish the night’s rest on the soft blue carpet, but when curiosity caught up with his consciousness, he knew he couldn’t go back to bed. He strained to see the clock on the desk. Four-thirty.
He trotted across the room on his hands and knees and lifted himself into his chair. The screen awoke and blinked into focus in a matter of seconds. As he suspected, he’d been sent a Shadow World news alert.
When news broke in Shadow World, it was reported in the Shadow media. For most people, this consisted of e-mailed news alerts, updating the player on matters of specific interest to his character. An alert might tell you that your favorite Shadow World singing group had scheduled a concert in your town, or that a work by your favorite Impressionist painter was going up for auction. Justin had subscribed to receive only a very specific type of news. If his e-mail light was flashing at four-thirty in the morning, someone in Shadow Chicago had been murdered.
In another Shadow World parallel, researchers observed that murders took place in the game at almost the same rate at which they occurred in the corresponding real cities. For Chicago, that meant over one per day. It was known that Shadow World thrill killing was a popular pastime for gamers, but no one seemed to understand why Shadow World murders, which were assumed to be perpetrated by different people and for different motives than their real counterparts, leveled out at the same rate.
Justin had asked to be notified only if the murderer hadn’t been apprehended at the scene and if the killing didn’t appear to be connected to a domestic dispute. That eliminated more than three quarters of them. At least once a week, however, Justin received a gruesome summary in his mailbox.
He scanned it quickly and it appeared to be a good candidate. He put on his headset and logged in to the game, and when his avatar materialized in his Shadow World bedroom, he started work. Shadow Justin dressed himself, snuck out the window, and jumped to the ground. He grabbed his electric bike from the garage and rode it to Shadow Northwood’s Metra stop. His inventory panel showed he had $40 in his pocket, a notebook, pen, camera, and Metra card, and he boarded the first train headed for downtown.
There weren’t many other players on the train at this hour. A tired-looking woman in a nursing uniform sat with her head resting against a window. A man in a suit, possibly a True-to-Lifer on an early commute, read the Sun-Times. A more casually dressed man sat in the first seat by the doors; Justin settled himself across the aisle and three seats up from him.
The train rumbled past dark houses and dark streets, the red lights of the crossings indicating when the train intersected a major road, and by counting them, Justin could determine the train’s location even without listening for the garbled announcements over the public-address system. After three stops the casual man approached and sat across the aisle from him. Justin turned and said hello. The man wore a yellow sweater with a collared shirt and glasses. He leaned forward and tried to speak, but the words in Justin’s headset were obscured by long beeps, and a text window above the man’s head printed the words ‹ AGE INAPPROPRIATE›. Whatever he was saying, the parental controls disapproved. The man stood up and walked quickly out of the car, in case Justin planned to turn him in to the conductor.
After arriving at Northwestern station, Shadow Justin walked to the El and rode up to Lakeview. The news alert said the murder had taken place in the 2400 block of North Lincoln, and he ran to the address, triggering a mild on-screen energy warning to remind him that his avatar hadn’t eaten breakfast.
Three policemen stood on the sidewalk sharing a box of Krispy Kremes. Shadow World cops were almost all wannabes in real life and they spoke and acted in keeping with the worst television cliches. They ate a lot of doughnuts and talked about “running down perps.” Justin found them annoying.
“Kid, nothing to see here,” one of the cops said as Justin tried to duck under the yellow police tape. “Move along.”
“Officer, come on,” Justin said, trying to peek down an alley blocked by the blue-and-white police car. Justin took some photos, which were saved to his hard drive. An evidence technician, possibly computer-generated, was measuring distances from the body to various parts of the alley and making notes on a clipboard. A reporter scribbled in her notebook.
The cops had turned their backs to him, getting on with their non-cop-related conversation. Justin slipped a doughnut from the box, slid across the hood of the car, and ducked under the yellow police tape.
“Kid! Hey!” one of the cops yelled after him, but didn’t give chase. The reporter looked up from her work and took a few steps in their direction until Justin was behind her.
“Officers, it’s okay,” the Shadow reporter said. “He’s with me.” The cops waved. She and Justin walked on to the body.
The parental controls were efficient at blocking out swearwords and improper propositions and obscuring nudity and sexual activity on-screen, but they did nothing to protect child players from violence. If youthful gamers were immune to violence, the makers reasoned, they could never be killed or even injured, and that would compromise the integrity of the game. In their minds, it was necessary for Shadow World children to fall down wells and get caught beneath tractors and be chased by cougars if cougars escaped from the zoo. Few parents knew about this loophole. Martha Finn certainly didn’t.
The body had fallen facedown by the front left tire of an old sedan. There was a lot of blood in an oval pool underneath her that dispersed in red canals under the car. Her clothes were soaked in it.
Justin turned to the reporter. “Sally,” he said, “what do we know?”
Twelve months ago, three years after their last photo session, Sally Barwick, Justin Finn’s first crush, made contact with his avatar outside his Shadow World school. She couldn’t contact him in real life, she said, because his mother still had a restraining order forbidding it. Sally was even afraid to come to Justin’s Shadow World home, in case Martha played the game. Sally told him she was sorry about the photos. Sorry she had been disloyal. She always thought he was a special kid. She thought about him often.
Justin was too embarrassed to have his avatar say it, but he still thought about her, as well.
She explained that her character had worked her way up to crime reporter for the Shadow Chicago Tribune. They traded theories about the real-life Wicker Man. Sally invited him to his first virtual midnight crime scene. Since then, they had met (behind Martha’s back) about twice a month over the corpse of a dead avatar in a Shadow Chicago alley.
“Justin, hi,” Shadow Barwick said. “Her name is Lindsay. Stabbed in the gut. Found by a couple of voyeurs about two hours ago. No witnesses. No murder weapon.”
Justin looked under the car. “Does this remind you of anything?” There was no one else within earshot so he dispensed with the formality of addressing her by name.
“What?”
“Three weeks ago. Shadow State Street. Blonde. Stabbed.”
“Yeah, her and about a hundred others,” Sally said. “This is just another thrill kill. Probably a teenager showing off for his buds.”
“You know what else I can’t help thinking about?” Justin said. “Something else this reminds me of?”
“What?”
“Not in here. Out there.”
“Don’t say it.”
“Okay, I won’t.”
“You got Wicker Man on the brain, little man.”
“You don’t think it’s weird? There are a lot of similarities.”
Barwick waved her pen in the air. “Okay, so it’s a copycat. You get a lot of those. A year before you joined the game they found a crazy guy in the Shadow suburbs with a couple dozen avatars buried in his crawl space. Some high school kid thought it’d be a laugh to be John Wayne Gacy for a few weeks. What an ‹ AGE INAPPROPRIATE›.”
“I have a theory,” Justin said. “Wanna hear it?”
“Sure. Why not?” Sally said.
“I think the Wicker Man has some outlet for his anger. That’s how he can go so long without killing sometimes.”
Leaning against the car, Shadow Barwick said, “Oh, ‹ AGE INAPPROPRIATE›! That’s crazy. You think the guy who did this is a True-to-Lifer?” Sally pointed at the lifeless avatar. “A serial killer in real life who’s also a serial killer in the game?”
“I’ve been charting the dates of the Wicker Man murders against the dates of similar murders here in the game,” Justin said.
“And?”
“Well, I haven’t figured out an exact pattern yet, but there are some interesting coincidences…”
“That’s all they are, Justin. Coincidences.” The police tech shooed Barwick’s hand from the car. She yawned and offered Justin a stick of gum from her bag. Sally unsheathed a second one for herself. “This here is just teenage boys messing around. Playing a sick game their conscience won’t let them play in reality.”
“Yeah?” Justin asked. “If you’re so sure there’s nothing to these killings, how come I see you taking detailed notes at every one?”
Shadow Sally stepped outside the police tape and threw the gum wrapper foil into a dumpster. “Heck,” she said. “I’m just doing my job.”