Soda Pop Soldier. Nick Cole

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      “Noble Son”—it’s a different voice than the game announcer, kindly, a sage or a king perhaps—“I am Callard the Wise of Rondor, and I’m here to help you. You must rescue a child of hope from the clutches of the diabolical Razor Maiden. Your training as a Samurai of the mysterious East has given you the Focused Slash ability and the Iron Hurricane attack. Armed only with your katana Deathefeather, you have journeyed many leagues into the southern deserts to reach a fabled lost city buried beneath shifting sands so that you can climb the jutting ruin of the Marrow Spike and confront evil itself.”

      Pause.

      Wait for it, I tell myself.

      “Alas, you have been captured by the nightmarish horde of the black witch Razor Maiden …”

      There it is. Captured.

      I hate games where you start off in the hole.

      The question now is, How many of my fellow contestants are also captured? Whoever’s not captured has a big advantage. Even worse, am I captured by one of my fellow players? Someone playing Darkness?

      “The Black horde has taken your hand in payment for daring to approach their forgotten realm,” continues Callard the Wise of Whatever. “But fear not, Samurai, there is hope! Somewhere within this ancient desert lies the Pool of Sorrows. If you can find it, maybe its restorative waters will return your lost hand, and then, once you’ve found your legendary blade Deathefeather, perhaps you might dispense the justice Razor Maiden so richly deserves.”

      I feel cheated.

      Damn Iain.

      A thousand bucks down the drain on a one-handed Samurai that’s probably being tortured and raped from the get-go.

      The picture on-screen dissolves as the voice of Callard reminds me to “find the child.” What child, I’m not sure, but apparently a child must be found.

      The screen changes from panorama to point of view. I’m inside the avatar’s skin. The HUD comes online and I’m checking the layout. Vitals are down 50 percent. But who’s exactly a million bucks after having their hand lopped off? My right clicks are enabled, so I scroll through a menu of available feats I can slave to the mouse and bind to the keyboard. I like the old-fashioned mouse, none of these reticle-cued, SoftEye enhancements everyone’s trying to sell me these days.

      With part of my mind on the screen that shows my surroundings, and the other scrolling through a submenu checking what skills I can employ, most of which are offline, I see the grotesque feet of a large monster shuffling toward me. My POV is only responding to the vaguest of movements, like I’m drugged or chained up or something. Over ambient, beyond the scrape of the jailer-monster’s feet, I hear an agonized scream followed by repeated cries for mercy. Then the obligatory tormented scream punctuation as hot iron sears flesh. Again, the screaming.

      The Dungeon of Endless Despair flashes across my screen.

      The jailer nears my body and hauls me upright. I stare from the darkness of my snow-swamped apartment in midtown Manhattan, into the face of an Ogre on-screen. Protruding canines and bleeding gums compete for computer-rendered audacity with an oozing gash that was once an eye.

      “Wot’s yur name, maggot?” growls the Ogre through my DellTashi display, something I purchased on credit after being confirmed for professional status with ColaCorp.

      A QuickMenu opens up asking me to type in my name.

      “Loser” springs to mind along with “Thousand-Dollars-Down-the-Drain Guy.”

      I can’t use PerfectQuestion. If ColaCorp knew I was gaming in the Black, I’d lose my pro status immediately.

      What comes next comes from nowhere. It doesn’t mean anything to me, and I can’t remember ever hearing it before.

      “Wu,” I type in.

      “Wu!” shrieks the Ogre and roars with laughter and flying spittle right in my face. My POV spins crazily about as the Ogre, easily well over seven feet tall, hurls my Samurai at a far wall. Ragdoll physics take over as the laws of the universe in this online world send me flying through the air. After a bone-rattling impact into a wall, I land on a thin pile of straw in the orange light of a nearby guttering wall torch. The damage deducts 2 percent from my Vitality and now I’m down to 48 percent.

      I’m still searching all the Samurai’s submenus. He has some awesome skills and devastating attacks. But all of them are offline, probably due to the missing hand and damage. I find one called Serene Focus. It’s live, so I enable and drag it onto the right mouse button. I read the quick hint description of the skill as once again the Ogre lumbers toward me all grunts and wheezy laughs.

      “I’ll baste yur bones with yur own blood ’n’ crack yur skull between me teeth, I will.”

      A very ogre thing to say.

      Meanwhile back at the skill description, I read that Serene Focus allows the user to slow down in-game time while still moving at an intensely fast speed.

      Yay, now I can watch the Ogre beat me to death in slow-mo.

      I scan the jail cell. Torchlight and shadows, more alcove than cell, it opens into an undefined gloom beyond the flickering light. I do not see my Samurai sword, Deathefeather, anywhere nearby. The guttering torch along the wall of my cell reveals nothing that would be useful right about now. The Ogre is almost on me again, grunting and laughing. I pan up and see the great sabers of his fangs rending his own scarred and bloody welt of a lip.

      I have to admit, whoever wrote this software, even though they’re stealing my thousand bucks, did a great job. It sucks to be me right now.

      The Ogre’s tumorous Adam’s apple bobs up and down. The game’s soundtrack cranks up to do or die with the bleating tribal horn of triumph every dark beast that ever walked the worlds of fantasy is known by.

      Imagination.

      I know what to do.

      I right-click Serene Focus, and the blaring war drums and horns slow down as though drowned in a thick syrup of sugary sonic deadness. The edges of my screen distort to soft focus. From somewhere nearby, I can hear the delicate strings of the Japanese koto plucking out singular, poignant notes.

      I don’t know why, but I understand now.

      It’s as if the programmer wrote a quick cut-scene illustrating the point of Serene Focus and dropped it onto my mental deck for a frame or two.

      “The hands of the Samurai are like the legs of a crane in a shallow pond. Early morning, fog and mist, they do not disturb the water, or hesitate. They lift and descend and the water remains unmarked.”

      Yeah, I understand how the crane walks through a shallow pond and doesn’t disturb the mirrored surface of the water.

      Creepy, huh?

      I target the Ogre’s bobbing throat and attack with my left mouse button. The Samurai’s only hand reaches out from my POV. In this instant, I hope the developer spent good money on things other than great graphics and good physics. A well-built game will render an opponent’s entire body, allocating damage based on anatomy and physiology. When computer games were first invented, all you could СКАЧАТЬ