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  “Do I want to see it?” I ask, dread already creeping up my spine at the very thought.

  “I sure wouldn’t,” she counters. “I mean, it’s just a digital version of you, but still. It’ll hurt. But I know you’re going to look anyway, so why are we even having this conversation?” She sighs loudly into the headset. “I know this isn’t going to make it sting any less, but that stream, everything that happened... Once I’m done processing the live footage into a recap video to upload tonight... I mean, it’s going to be really gripping. Viral content on our hands here, Div.”

  “Yeah, probably,” I say glumly.

  I can think of a lot of other ways I’d like to see myself go viral, though. In a video for something I’m proud of. Some kind of grand accomplishment, instead of going down in pixelated flames, at the hands of a bunch of Internet trolls. A joke.

  “A couple game sites are already posting about what happened on their socials, and a few microblogs are linking to some collected social posts,” she continues, and I can see her typing away furiously. “Damn, I gotta get ahead of this thing and finish compiling the video. Sucks, Div, I know, but we’re gonna get a lot of traffic here. And that does mean more revenue, potentially.”

  “Right, right.” I know Rebekah’s trying to get me to see the silver lining, but all I can think about is the staggering amount of time it’ll take to level back up. To where I was, playing since launch? Weeks.

  Will people stick around to watch me trying to rebuild? Will I lose subscribers?

  I think about the rent check.

  And I hate that being able to help my mom is so goddamn dependent on my subscriber count.

  “Keep your head up,” she says. “And hey, it’s still early. You can probably dive in for a bit tonight and start upgrading.”

  “This is true,” I admit, stretching in my chair. “Shoot me a text when the video is up, so I can post about it without having to watch the damn thing.”

  “Without—”

  I cut her off. “I’m not about to relive my own destruction all over again and listen to those toolbags talk about me like that twice over. Just...find a way to make this waking nightmare look good?”

  “Deal.”

  Rebekah signs off, her little video window going blank, and I spin in my computer chair for a couple of rotations, looking around my room, coming back to reality. Rocketing back, even. While all that chaos was going on in the virtual world, in literal digital space, I was just here. In my room. My tiny room, with my bare furniture and lackluster...well, everything.

  I pull my smartphone out of my pocket, another sponsored gadget that’s way nicer than anything I’d be able to afford—one of the few things I’ve allowed myself to keep—and load up my email. The new watch sponsorship offer is in there, and an absolutely mind-boggling number of interview requests regarding what just happened literally five minutes ago. Polygon. Engadget. Giant Bomb. The list goes on. And my social media notifications are insane—the ones I allow myself to be emailed, anyway. Direct message alerts and the like. People sending love, people sending support, people sending—

  I stop scrolling, staring at one email subject that stands out among the rest.

  Rebekah Cole

  FWD: Sponsorship opportunity with Samsung

  8:30 p.m.

  The Vox Populi

  This is just the beginning...

  8:28 p.m.

  H. Siddiqui

  Sponsoring a new VR set?

  8:12 p.m.

  Polygon Digest

  PlayStation Deals This Week & More

  7:43 p.m.

  ManaPunk Newsletter

  Sign up for the open beta of Knights...

  7:40 p.m.

  The trolls. That clan. They emailed me.

  I think about deleting it. That’s been our strategy since Rebekah and I first started streaming last year. Any contact with trolls was always filtered through her. She even has access to my personal inbox to avoid situations like this one. I should just leave it there for her to tackle later, or better yet, delete the email myself so she has one less thing to deal with.

  But their clan name. I know what it means.

  The Vox Populi.

  The popular opinion.

  Man. Fuck these guys.

  I give it a click.

  This is just the beginning...[INBOX]

  The Vox Populi [[legion@thevoxpopuli.net> (15minutesago)

  to me

  We cannot be stopped. Strike us down, and more will rise. Report us, ban us, and more will take our place.

  People like you have no place in our world. This isn’t about gender or race. It’s actually about talent in the streaming community, and you’re taking up space for those far more deserving.

  Leave. You aren’t welcome here.

  The Vox Populi

  That line. That fucking “actually” line. That makes me scowl at it even more. It isn’t about gender or race, huh? That’s enough to tell me that it is about that. It’s the “I’m not racist but—” of passive-aggressive conversation.

  There’s an attachment, too. The file’s named Warning.jpg. Gmail’s usual scan for viruses comes up blank, and when the small thumbnail loads up in the window, it looks...strangely familiar. My heart races as I click it.

  It opens.

  And I see a photograph of my apartment building.

  My breath catches in my throat. How?

  How could this have happened?

  I’ve been so careful. I never use my real last name. The location and hometown on my social media accounts is “The Internet.” My personal accounts are just that—personal. My Facebook, Instagram...all locked down to just my real friends, few that there are, and family.

  My heart is pounding so hard that I can feel it in my temples, thrumming in my ears.

  I inhale sharply, bolt to the window in my living room, and cautiously peer out the blinds, just a crack through the thin, cheap plastic. It takes me a minute to remember the picture in the email was of my building in the daytime, and right now, the sun is gone.

  They’d already been here.

  And who knows when.

  I hustle back to my desk and close out the email, placing my hands on the surface. I take a deep breath, several of them, trying to calm down. Anxiety churns through me, the muscles in my back tensing up.

  They aren’t saying it directly, but this is a threat. A doxing threat. To reveal where I live. To set me up to be attacked. To be stalked. To be harassed in person. It’s one of those moments when you can’t say, “It’s just the Internet,” and wait for it to go away. A viral tweet that people share, a photo that gets too much attention...

  This is real. And so are the consequences.

  I glance up at my computer screen, reopen my email, and forward their message to Reclaim the Sun’s harassment support team. The people over there must have a file for me by now, but this...this one is different. This isn’t just a hateful email. Or a racist or sexually explicit tweet or message on the game’s server. It’s the first step in doxing. They know my address. They know where I live. They could blast it out to the whole of the Internet.

  I move to forward the email to Rebekah as well, then stop. I can’t let her see this. I can’t do that to her. Not after what happened to her last year.

  Not after him.

  Instead, I archive it and click over to my social feeds, to see if the Vox Populi has followed through on their threat, but I don’t see anyone posting details abo
ut where I live or pictures of my building.

  Not yet.

  The crushing anxiety in my chest feels like it’s set to collapse my body inside itself, like a star gone supernova. Knowing that something might happen, and waiting for the axe to fall, is almost worse than it happening.

  I click away and open Reclaim the Sun again, the loading screen waiting for me. After briefly closing my eyes in resignation, I hit start and find myself back at the beginning, at a space station, a few basic ships available to acquire. No upgrades, no paint jobs, no anything. My inventory is empty. My body and gear are at the bottom of a nameless sea on a planet across the digital universe.

  Assholes.

  But I refuse to be made afraid. I’ve got work to do.

  4

  AARON

  ACT 2 (FOREST, EVENING)

  [Transition seamlessly to Cut Scene]

  The party stands around a campfire in the wilderness, warming themselves by the flames. The trees are silhouettes, dark and ominous, and a few pairs of yellow eyes can be seen peering out from the brush.

  MAGE

  If we don’t reach the bandit captain’s settlement at the end of The Dark Highway by sundown, they’re going to kill the Elvish Queen.

  The MAGE waves their hands, and a purple haze materializes. In the foggy clouds, a vision of the Elvish Queen, Randielle, can be seen by the entire party. Randielle struggles against her binds, spitting in the face of an unknown bandit warrior.

  ROGUE

  I don’t see why those people won’t just pay the ransom. It could all be over so quickly.

  The ELF takes an enraged step forward, shifting around the fire, and draws two daggers that glimmer in the firelight.

  ELF

  What do you mean, those people?

  ROGUE

  Whoa, now, I didn’t mean—

  “Aaron!”

  I look up from my laptop, just in time to catch the ManaPunk crew pulling up some seats. The café is a hodgepodge of miscellaneous furniture, enormous plush sofas with intricate carved wooden frames next to postmodern steel bar stools and tall tables. The team pulls up several wooden chairs, each a different bright color, each clashing against the other, squeaking loudly on the hardwood floor of LaVa. It’s my favorite spot to write—close enough that I can walk or bike, and not too crowded with tourists, being at the north end of South Street.

  The roar of a coffee grinder whirs to life while Jason, Laura, and Ryan get settled, the smell of roasted coffee grounds wafting through the air, thick and sweet, blending in with the aroma of Mediterranean food. During the day, the place mostly does coffee, breakfasts, and light lunches, but for the dinner hour it closes down to café goers and becomes a restaurant.

  “How’s everything going?” Jason asks. He launched ManaPunk three years ago, when I was just starting off as a freshman at Central and he was a senior wrestling with serious senioritis, with no time for anything that had to do with our high school. Despite nearly failing out of school, he’s now off changing the mobile gaming world—and he’s brought a few of us geeks along for the ride.

  Laura, who just graduated this year, takes a seat next to Jason, and Ryan snags the chair beside mine. The cushion lets out a loud whoosh when he leans back against it, and we all chuckle, Ryan the loudest. He’s a year under me, and we’ve spent most of our lunches this year dreaming up video games or playing them.

  Well, our lunches and our entire lives. We’ve been gaming together since we were in grade school.

  “Not bad, working on the—” I start, and promptly stop as Jason stretches. He’s got a tattered jean jacket on, covered in punk rock–looking pins of bands he insists we all listen to and often blasts whenever we’re working at his small studio space. He threatened to fire me and Ryan when we didn’t know who MxPx or Goldfinger was, so now I know their entire respective discographies. But the buttons aren’t what’s giving me pause—it’s his T-shirt. It’s ripped all over the place, but not in some stylish way. In a this-is-an-old-T-shirt-and-it’s-time-to-throw-it-in-the-garbage kind of way.

  “What?” Jason asks, and then looks down at his shirt. He laughs. “Oh, what can you do?”

  “You’re literally a millionaire,” Ryan says before I can, pointing at Jason and his ripped-up T-shirt then glancing back at me, an exasperated look on his face. “Why do you always dress like you’ve just crawled out of a car accident or something?”

  “Whatever, man,” he huffs. “People like my style.”

  “What people?” Laura asks, smirking.

  “There...there are people!” Jason argues, but he fusses with a few buttons on his jean jacket, closing off the view of the torn fabric and grumbling under his breath. “Focusing on clothes and all that crap takes away from my creative process, okay? I have games to make. I have a vision. Physical aesthetics just get in my way and take up brainpower I could be using for—”

  Ryan, Laura, and I just stare at him.

  “What? Mark Zuckerberg does the same thing.”

  I give Ryan a look, and Laura purses her lips, eyes bright with amusement.

  “Man, fuck you guys, it was laundry day,” Jason admits, and all of us burst into laughter. I feel the pressure from my mom washing away a little in moments like these, with the ManaPunk gang, away from the suffocating atmosphere of my house. Jason pushes the three of us to create what we care about: me, with my scripts; Ryan, with his gorgeous illustrations and storyboards; and Laura, with her coding, hammering away on her keyboard in a language I could never hope to understand, like she’s speaking right to the computer’s soul.

  Jason shakes his head and gets up from the table. “What do you guys want?” he asks. “I’m buying.”

  “Yeah, you are,” Ryan says with a smirk. “We’re still waiting to be paid, you know.”

  “It’s coming, it’s coming.” Jason waves him off and catches my side-eye. “Don’t give me that look. I’m working on it.”

  “Black coffee for me,” Laura cuts in.

  “She likes her coffee like she likes herself—bitter,” Ryan quips, smiling across the table.

  “False. Dark and strong,” Laura claps back. “And don’t compare me to food. Isn’t your best friend a writer? That’s cliché as hell.”

  “Point goes to Laura,” I say.

  “Always does.” She grins. “Grab me a plain muffin, too, or lemon. Surprise me.”

  “And surprise me with a check,” Ryan says, tilting his head and drumming his fingers on the table. When Jason scowls at him, he adds, “Though some tea and a blueberry scone wouldn’t go amiss, either.”

  “Always grumbling about money. Isn’t your dad a lawyer?” Laura huffs and looks at her nails. “You’ll be fine.”

  “That’s not the point,” Ryan snaps. “And you know it.”

  “So, um... I’ll get a hot chocolate?” I venture. Ryan turns and glares at me, and I shrug, the tension diffusing as Jason heads toward the counter. I’m just as irritated, but I just need this to be...this. Us, making games, not worrying about what my mother can’t stop stressing over.

  Jason is going to do right by us. I just know it.

  Ryan sucks air through his teeth as we all pull out our smartphones, gearing up for my favorite part of these meetups of ours.

  Every week, we try to find the absolute worst game we can in our respective app stores, me and Ryan the die-hard Apple iOS users, Laura and Jason unstoppable Android fans. We take screenshots of gameplay, the title, and the like, and download the game to share. Screenshots are key, as the games sometimes disappear from the app stores before we meet up. Poorly made titles where the developer has to pull the program, or clones of other games that get shut down directly by Apple or Android... There are plenty of reasons why something might vanish within a week or so.

  It’s the most ridiculous tradition and rule of every meeting, but
we’d likely do it even if it wasn’t a required team-building, lesson-learning type of thing handed down to us by Jason. It’s always good for a laugh, and whoever has the worst game gets to pick our next meetup spot.

  I flip to this week’s hilarious find, then lean over to try and sneak a peek at Ryan’s phone.

  “No way!” he says, angling the screen away from me. His blue eyes flash with mischievous glee, and he’s smiling so big I can see the snaggle tooth he pretends to hate, but I know he really doesn’t. I’ve overheard several girls talking about it being cute at our school, and his boyfriend, Alberto, always makes it a point to get him to smile as broadly as possible in their selfies.

  “My pick this week is way too good,” Ryan boasts. “Neither of you stand a chance.”

  “Hah!” Laura chuckles. “We’ll see about that. Mine was buried so far in the app store that I had to downgrade my OS to even install it. I made my phone practically useless for this thing.”

  “Damn,” Ryan says, clearly impressed, his smile fading away. “That’s a lot of effort for a not-so-great prize. I guess we’ll see.”

  Last week, I’d won with a terrible Angry Birds clone, Furious Chinchillas. It looked almost the same as Angry Birds, only instead of catapulting the iconic brightly colored birds toward those green piglets, there were these supposed-to-be chinchillas? That flew for some reason? The physics programming in the game was all wrong, and the things either flew off the screen or just didn’t go anywhere. It had a single-star rating from thousands of aggregated reviews—clearly from people just downloading it for the sake of novelty—and the game was absolutely riddled with obnoxious advertisements everywhere.

  But when you think about it, thousands of people took the time to leave reviews for this game. I read an article once that something like only 3 to 5 percent of users ever leave a review for something, so there are likely tens of thousands more people who also paid a dollar to download this thing. And with all the ad revenue...that chinchilla developer is likely rolling in cash the way chinchillas roll around in dust baths, bad reviews or not.