Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

The York was crowded but a couple abandoned their seats at the bar, and Shadow Sam took one. He ordered a beer, left a fifty on the counter, and turned around to scope the room. Youngsters, hipsters, a desegregated mix of straight and gay. A pair of girls danced together to the jukebox Rolling Stones. They were both blonde and shapely and pretty in a cartoon way, as most everyone was in the game, save the True-to-Lifers. Sam took pride in the fact that his icon looked a lot like him. In fact, last year, when he was stuck in a gymless Saint Louis hotel and gained five pounds in a week, he updated his avatar with the extra weight. That kind of honesty was unusual among gamers.

He watched the girls dance for a while, their hips swaying and arms lifting in a repeatable programmed loop based loosely on the hustle, and then he asked if he could buy them drinks. He stood up and offered them his chair as well as the stool next to it. The bartender made more change from what remained of the fifty.

Their names were Donna and Lindsay. No one handed out his or her last name in Shadow World, except the hard-core True-to-Lifers or people looking to start a relationship. He said he was Sam.

“Lindsay, that’s a nice dress,” he said into the headset microphone. According to conversation protocol, gamers used the name of the person being addressed when there was more than one person within listening distance, or in the “halo of conversation.”

“Sam, thanks. I bought it at Saks.” That is, she bought it with Shadow dollars at the Shadow Saks Fifth Avenue. Lindsay put her hand on Sam’s leg just above the pocket where he’d put the knife.

“Lindsay, you have pretty hair. Is it real?” Sam was asking if the actual Lindsay looked anything like this or if she had created a sexy avatar through which she could live the virtual life of a prettier woman. He didn’t care one way or the other, but these were the flirty and inane conversations one had in Shadow World just to advance the time, to get to the next, better thing.

“Sam, it’s real,” she said. “Dyed, but real.” In his earpiece, he heard her giggle.

“Lindsay, Sam, bye,” Donna said. She already saw where this was going and moved down the bar to play with someone else.

“Lindsay, do you want to go for a walk?” Sam’s avatar asked.

“Sure!” Lindsay replied.

They walked outside and turned right on the sidewalk and had more ridiculous conversation of the real world rather than Shadow World kind. Sam turned down an alley and Lindsay followed. There was a car parked under a broken light, thirty or so feet from the street. Sam pressed Lindsay against it and started kissing her.

In Shadow World, players were constantly pairing off with strangers and having sex in public places. Countless magazine articles on the subject quoted psychologists who explained this was a common fantasy for both men and women, and it made sense that people would use the game to act it out in a world with no lasting consequences (venereal disease should have been more widespread in the game, but Shadow World public officials had taken the threat seriously and infection rates were only slightly higher than in the real world). If Shadow Sam spotted a woman alone in a bar, he could usually get her to an alley in even shorter time than this.

Shadow sex wasn’t the most visually stimulating thing. Programmers hadn’t yet mastered the code to make on-screen characters seem realistic or sexy. The naked icons appeared as textureless flesh-colored versions of their clothed selves, and the same visuals (her with mouth open, him with eyes closed, hips thrusting together in mechanical rhythm) looped and repeated again and again. Online sex was a big draw of the game, however, so the makers were working on a more explicit, adults-only plug-in for version 5.0.

Shadow World sex was similar to a dirty two-person (or sometimes three- or four- or seven-person) chat. As player icons mashed together on-screen, the players would shout and moan and call each other filthy names and describe how close they were to climaxing and what unexpected things they were going to do next to please their partners. Voyeurs, mostly kids whose parents had never bothered to activate parental controls, scanned the back streets at night looking to spy on illicit couplings like this one and record them to their hard drives. There were several Web sites devoted to the playback of amateur Shadow World pornos.

Unsuspecting Lindsay whispered many of the usual erotic cliches. When Sam reached into the puddle of pants around his ankles, she must have thought he was looking for a condom because she said, “Sam, do you want me to help you put it on?” As she spoke, the mouth of her avatar opened into a small black oval and collapsed into a flat red line like the mouth flap on an old Saturday morning cartoon. The subtleties of lip movement were still beyond Shadow World’s capabilities.

Sam’s avatar shook the towel from the blade and said, “Lindsay, no thanks,” and plunged the knife into her left side.

“Goddammit! Sonofabitch!” Lindsay yelped. They weren’t cries of fear or pain, but frustration and anger. Whatever riches or fame or happiness her character had amassed in Shadow World would be wiped out as the life bled from her avatar. She would have to start the game over as her own boring self again.

Shadow Lindsay collapsed backward onto the hood of the car. Sam picked up the towel and wrapped the knife in it and returned them to his pocket. He surveyed the alley to make sure he hadn’t left any clues and to make sure there wasn’t a punk voyeur hiding in the shadows. He walked back to Lincoln Avenue and found his car, and he drove east to Lake Shore Drive, past the pink building on his way home. He closed the door to his apartment quietly, washed the knife in the kitchen sink, and tiptoed into the bedroom. The woman was still asleep in his Shadow World bed just as the young art director was still in the actual one. The real Sam Coyne had never left his apartment.

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.