All of them were on full dives from their own desks or the cafeteria. During the dive, their flesh-and-blood bodies were left defenseless, but messing with people in the middle of a dive was a clear violation of etiquette, so no one besides Haruyuki worried about it. He had returned to his classroom after a dive in the local net to find the pants on his uniform pulled down maybe a month or so after school started.
Hiding his flesh body in the toilet and wanting to avoid other eyes even in the virtual world, he started climbing the stairs carved into the tree that was his destination. The higher he climbed, the less popular the games. After passing baseball, basketball, golf, and tennis, and even ignoring the Ping-Pong floor, he finally arrived at the virtual squash corner.
There wasn’t a single student in the room. The reason for the floor’s lack of popularity was clear. Squash is sort of like tennis, but you hit the ball with a racquet in a space enclosed from top to bottom and on all sides by hard walls. The ball bounces back, and the player silently returns it over and over. It was a thoroughly lonely sport.
In reality, Haruyuki liked first-person shooter games the best, the kind where players run around a battlefield carrying a machine gun, and in those games, he was good enough to hold his own against guys in the states (the home of the FPS). It was also a popular genre in Japan, of course, but there was no way something like that would be available on the school network. When he was in elementary school, Haruyuki had killed pretty much all of the guys in his class with a single handgun, and from the next day on, he had been bullied mercilessly. Ever since, Haruyuki had promised himself he would never again play the same games as the kids at school, no matter the genre.
He walked over to the right edge of the deserted court and held up the control panel with one hand. The panel accessed Haruyuki’s student ID number and retrieved his saved level and high scores. Since the middle of the first term, he had been killing time here during his lunch hour, focusing exclusively on this game. As a result, he’d achieved a staggeringly high score. He was actually getting tired of squash, but it wasn’t like he had anywhere else to go.
Haruyuki grabbed the racquet that popped up from the panel and held it firmly in his pink right hand with its black hoof. After the words GAME START appeared, a ball dropped down out of nowhere. He hit it with everything he had, pouring every ounce of today’s misery into the racquet.
Thk! Leaving a momentary flash, the ball flew up like a laser and struck the floor and the forward wall before returning. Aided by reflex more than sight, Haruyuki returned the ball with a backhand, taking a step to the left in line with the optimal solution to which his brain automatically guided him.
The real Haruyuki obviously could not move like this. But this was an electronic world, free of the chains of meatspace. Watching the ball and moving his body were just quantum signals traveling back and forth between his brain and the Neurolinker.
The ball abruptly lost its substance, leaving nothing but a faint trace of light on the court. The thwack it made sounded several times a second, echoing like a machine gun. Still, Haruyuki made his pig’s body leap and dance and his racket sing in every direction.
Dammit, who needs reality anyway?
The scream of resentment pierced the back of his brain, unable to shut out his problems even while tackling the game at top speed.
Why do we need dumb stuff like a real classroom or a real school? People can live entirely virtually already. I mean, the world stinks with grown-ups actually doing just that. So much so that they even did those experiments way back when, where they turned a person’s entire consciousness into quantum data and tried to build a real parallel universe.
And yet despite all that, they toss groups of us kids into real-life cages to learn group life and develop some kind of morals, or for whatever other idiotic reasons they have. All well and good for Araya and them, probably helps them relax a bit and save their allowances. But for me…I don’t know what else I can do.
A bell sounded, and his game increased a level in the corner of his vision.
The ball accelerated abruptly. The angle of return was also irregular, and the ball came powering along, drawing an arc from an unexpected direction. Haruyuki’s reaction time gradually started to lag.
Dammit! I have to accelerate, have to go faster. So fast I can break through every wall in the virtual world and even the real world and go somewhere without people! Fast!
The racquet cut through the air with a whoosh. The ball, now nothing more than a beam of light, grazed Haruyuki’s cheek, passed behind him, and vanished. The words GAME OVER dropped down accompanied by a silly, sad trombone sound effect and bounced around on the court. Without glancing at his blinking high score, Haruyuki turned back to the panel to restart the game, head hanging.
At that moment, a voice suddenly rocked Haruyuki’s sacred hiding place.
“Oh!! So this is where you locked yourself up!!” The screech was so high-pitched it was like lightning bolts in his ears, or rather his brain. Stiffening his back with a start, Haruyuki turned around to find a student avatar in the same animal class as his.
Even so, it didn’t have the slightest bit of the silliness of Haruyuki’s pig. The slim, supple cat was covered in silver fur tinged with purple, with blue ribbons tied on one ear and the tip of her tail. It hadn’t been put together from scratch right from polygons, but each of the parameters had clearly been tinkered with.
A touch of anger rose up in her golden eyes, and the cat opened wide her mouth with its small fangs and cried out again, “Lately, you’ve just disappeared the whole lunch hour, Haru, so I came looking for you! Games are great and all, but you don’t have to play this kind of lame game, you know. You should come and play with the rest of us!”
“…I can do what I want. Leave me alone.”