Soda Pop Soldier. Nick Cole

I don’t see any obvious enemies. Yet.

      “Even now, pretty and not so pretty little things,” continues the announcer abruptly, “you’re awakening from your crypts, graves, tombs, and sewers …” On-screen the view switches to a collapsing graveyard in some courtyard near the the tower, forgotten and abandoned millennia untold. Gravestones with Gorey-like inscriptions denote fallen warriors. The sound of grinding stone caressing stone erupts across the ambient soundscape. A necrotic hand pushes from the earth. The piano continues to strike those minor chords, alternating now with other diminished chords that seem full of suffering and hollow all at once, turning the soundtrack into a march, into a call to nothing good.

      I hate the undead.

      They make me jittery. In most games, they just come at you in waves. Guns are basically useless. In fact, most things are useless against the undead. In the end it comes down to baseball bats and lead pipes. Which doesn’t matter—the more of them you send back to death, the more of them appear. I always wonder, after games I’ve played that involve the undead, after killing a thousand, two thousand, what that does to my mind. It can’t be good. One time I played a game where I had to kill fifty-seven-thousand-plus undead just to unlock an achievement. I can distinguish between reality and games, but … some people can’t. What does killing fifty-seven thousand humanlike once humans do to players?

      The undead are a hard way to spend a thousand bucks.

      A hard way to make rent.

      “Prisoners and fiends, victims and in-betweens … ,” continues the game’s unseen announcer. The rattling of chains, a tortured scream, a woman sobs. Everything happens fast and just moments before the game reveals my avatar, the unknown character I’ll play as I attempt to beat this game, I see the tower above and hear the whimpering of a child.

      “Razor Maiden, devourer of the innocent, eater of life, queen of hell, commands that you die tonight, or live trying.”

      In these online tournaments, and might I add, illegal open source online tournaments, the goal is to figure out the game and then beat it before all the other players find and beat you. You’ve got to start somewhere, and often that’s a game in and of itself that must be beat before you can actually start beating the main game. Just like life. I’m guessing the game I’ll be playing to start with is “escape.” But from where and how, I don’t know just yet. Along the way is where I’ll really make money. Contests, treasure troves, even in-game bargains can lead to big cash and interesting prizes. Or so I’ve been told.

      The intro is over and now my story, the story of my avatar, begins.

      “Please be Light,” I whisper once more in my empty and very dark apartment.

      Gloomy clouds thicken on-screen, then a golden shaft of light, something my eyes are starving for, stabs down through the clouds.

      In Olde English script, the word Light appears as I hear a distant trumpet play a fading call to arms.

      “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,