MetaWars: Fight For The Future

Chapter 6

The Chang Academy was sited on its own private island, a little way out to sea.

Jonah made for the mainland. He passed over a ring of islands with sandy beaches, swaying coconut trees, and Tikitiki cocktail bars. He looked down to see oblivious avatars sunning themselves on their virtual holidays. As he reached the mainland, he swooped over a haunted forest, where a massive, multiplayer role-play game was in full swing. He spotted platoons of avatars chasing after transparent ghosts with rifles and electric nets. The game, Ghost Smackdown 3, was popular with some of Jonah’s classmates, but when Jonah played a MMORPG, he preferred hunting ‘Brain Sucking Zombies’.

As he gained height, the virtual world sprawled out beneath Jonah like a patchwork quilt. Anyone could buy a plot of virtual land in the Metasphere, and build whatever they wanted on it. These days, big developers were snapping up huge adjacent plots to create giant themed zones – but still, the bulk of the landscape was a hodgepodge of clashing designs and functions.

Jonah banked left above the bright, primary colours of Blockhead Headlock, a popular game zone that Jonah had long grown out of. The usual barrage of advertising pop-ups came screeching and hectoring after him, but he outpaced them easily.

The sky around him thronged with avatars of all shapes and sizes: animals, humatars and geometrical shapes. Most numerous were the birds and the winged insects, and Jonah thought he spotted a grinning helicopter. You didn’t need to have wings or rotors to fly in the Metasphere, but those that did appeared to enjoy flying the most.

Jonah touched down in Venus Park: a manicured, Japanese-style cherry blossom paradise, where avatars hovered along the curving pathways or flew between the trees, two by two.

The park was a place for lovers. Separated by great distances in the real world, they could stroll together here, under blossom leaves and over the ornate bridges of the goldfish ponds. Jonah spotted a multi-coloured giraffe walking with a floating rhombus, and a woolly mammoth holding a bouquet of virtual flowers in its trunk, trying to impress a giggling bumblebee that hovered just out of reach.

He didn’t understand why people chose to call that other world – that dull, grey place – the ‘real’ one. It didn’t feel half as real or as vibrant as this world did to him. Venus Park reminded Jonah of better times. On one of the streets that faced the park was the Delacroix family gift shop. He had spent many happy weekends and school holidays working there with his mum and dad, selling digital trinkets to the park’s long-distance couples.

As Jonah looked around, he saw the bumblebee kiss the mammoth and then they parted, diving through their respective exit halos and returning to their real- world lives.

Jonah often wondered who was behind those avatars. He tried to imagine their real-world bodies, like his body, slumped in meta-trances somewhere as their minds flew free. To him, it was unfair that other avatars disguised their users. Jonah’s dad, whose own avatar had been a sleek red dragon, had always said he should be proud that his virtual and real selves were so close to one another. It meant he had nothing to hide.

He saw a group of protestors, marching back and forth in front of the park gates with an angry, mangy hyena at their head.

‘Keep the Millennials off our freedoms!’ barked the hyena. The protesting avatars cheered and applauded his words. It made Jonah so angry that some people could be so ignorant.

With a sigh, he headed for his family’s shop. He didn’t want to sell it. But his mother was right; he didn’t want to starve to death either.

The windows of the shop were boarded up, pasted over with digital leaflets from auctioneers and estate agents offering to sell the land. Jonah ripped down one flyer, promising ‘fast sale, low fees’, and the locked door opened for him with one scan of his avatar.

The shelves inside were almost empty, with just a handful of heart-shaped cakes, balloons and teddy bears left upon them. The gift shop had been closed for almost two years now. Mum had blamed governmental red tape, but Jonah knew this was only part of the story. The business had been failing, its brand of virtual gifts and apps considered old-fashioned now. Most days, there had been no more than one or two customers. It had become too much for Jonah’s mum. She had found it too painful to be here, alone.

She had torn out her DI socket and joined the metaphobes and the luddites stuck in the real world. Jonah couldn’t bear the fact that she had done that to herself, cut herself off from the Metasphere, the only reality that mattered, just when he had needed her most. He had tried to respect her decision, but he hadn’t ever understood it.

Jonah spent the rest of the morning cleaning out the shop. He wanted it to be sale-ready for auction to fetch the highest bids. He collected the unsold teddy bears and trinkets, stuffed them into a box and coded them for recycling credits.

He tapped the leaflet, from which sprang a pop-up message asking him to confirm his listing. He tapped YES and flicked the dialogue box away with a flick of his hand. And waited.

The leaflet flickered and scanned the property, generating a 3D blueprint of the shop that hovered above the leaflet. Another pop-up appeared, quoting Jonah an estimated sale price of two hundred and seven meta- dollars, Barely worth it, he thought. Before he had a chance to agree to the listing, another box appeared, flashing in red: WARNING – UNKNOWN APPLICATION DISCOVERED. The small print read:

An Unknown Application has been discovered in the property. This may be a virus. Please delete this application before proceeding to auction.

Jonah looked around the empty shop and couldn’t see any apps, but he didn’t want to look too hard. The unknown app gave him an excuse not to sell.

Then he noticed something strange about the 3D model. It showed a level below which Jonah was standing. The shop had a secret cellar.

Jonah pulled the empty display cabinets to the walls and stared hard at every centimetre of the virtual wooden floor, before shoving over each display cabinet to see what lay beneath. And there it was, below a cabinet in the centre of the shop – a trapdoor in the floor, with a metal ring for a handle.

Jonah had grown up in this shop. He thought he had explored it thoroughly, poked his nose into every corner, every crevice. So how could there be something here he hadn’t seen before?

Jonah’s heart beat faster as he took the handle in his hand, pulled it, lifted the door open. He was greeted by a strong musty smell and, looking down, he could make out two brick walls, meeting at a corner. The cellar was as long and as wide as the shop itself.

Did Mum and Dad know about this?

It was dark down there, and Jonah wished he had a torch. There could have been anything hiding in that darkness. Some valuable treasure, he hoped – something left behind by the previous owners that could solve all the Delacroixes’ problems. He shook his head; that was just stupid wishful thinking. All the same...

There was no ladder; Jonah dropped himself into the secret cellar. He stood there for a long moment, blinking, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He noticed something. Something that caused his stomach to do a somersault.

He wasn’t alone. There was somebody – or something – in the cellar with him.

A figure, crouching in the corner. One he had never thought he would see again.

It was a huge, red dragon. Its wings were folded behind its back. Its fierce yellow eyes were glaring right at Jonah. He took two steps back, away from the creature, then he stopped himself. And approached it instead.

He knew this avatar, knew it almost as well as he knew his own, but... But that was impossible. Wasn’t it?

‘Dad?’

<<I hope you're loving the story so far. This is actually the first of four books. They are published in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, and soon in Russia and in Canada in January.  I wanted to share this first book with the wattpad world because there's such a love of stories in this community.  J>>