Between studying and playing a video game, I suppose a smart person would study. Anyone who studies first and plays later is someone who cares about their future, their role in society, and all that other garbage. 

Let’s get it out of the way from the start: I am not that person. 

So when Sam texts me in the middle of bio to let me know that a level 3 drop is happening in twenty minutes at the park, the most important question is: how do I get to the park in twenty minutes? I want to be five minutes early to account for any connectivity issues, make sure Sam and I are linked, and take a moment to get mentally prepared. It will take me about ten minutes to walk there. I could run, but the air is cold today, somewhere below freezing, and the snow a foot or two deep, which means that running would be a lot of effort to save a minute. I’ll have to grab my coat at my locker, which adds a few more minutes. That’s about seventeen minutes. I have twenty.

I need to go now.

Where are you? I text. 

Headed out now.

Figures. My best sparring partner will not make any mistakes getting out of school.

I raise my hand. I’m tall. The teacher can’t miss it.

“Yes?“

“Bathroom,” I mumble.

The teacher walks to my chair and holds out the wooden pass. I wrap my hand around the end of it, but she does not let go.

“What is the purpose of RNA?” she asks.

It’s a game she plays. Make the student repeat some information while he’s in the middle of a bladder emergency. She thinks our ability to remember something is heightened under stress.

She’s been talking about the four bases of RNA, and how the RNA can replicate a pattern. DNA is like the hard drive, storing the information passively, and RNA transcription is like the operating system, interpreting the coded string to create something interpretable as real. A digital operating system can interpret a string of ones and zeros as the strength of each color on each of a million pixels, which, taken together, create an image that I can understand. That string of ones and zeros can be turned into all kinds of other output—sound, touch, pulses of a motor—just as an amino acid pattern can be turned into a finger or something. But an RNA piece is not a zero or a one. It’s a zero, one, two, or three, and in that way one piece of RNA holds four possibilities, not two—twice as much as any binary storage. That cuts storage space in half, and that would be really cool.

All of this flits through my brain in a fraction of a second. I didn’t say I don’t know things. Just that between studying and gaming, well… we all know what I will do.

Who has time to say all that, anyway? I have an objective, so I mumble, “Transcription.”

She stares at me for a moment, either pondering her next sentence or wondering if I parroted a word without understanding it. “Right,” she says, releasing her grip on the bathroom pass, “The RNA transcribes the information…” She turns her back to me and walks toward the front of the room, rambling on about adenosine and guanine and what not.

Out of her field of sight, I slip a hand into my backpack, pull out the extra battery pack, and slip it into my pocket. I can’t carry the backpack out of the room without the teacher getting suspicious. But I need the extra charge. 

I walk out into the hallway and set the bathroom pass on little shelf on the wall. If I’m very, very lucky, she might forget I ever left for the bathroom, and someone might do me a good deed and slip the pass back on her desk.

Doubt it.

Did I mention the drop was level 3?

Once I’m a safe audible distance from the classroom, I jog down the hallway, then another hallway, then another, grab my coat from the locker, run down another hallway, past the gym, and out into the cold air. 

Sam is there. 

“No backpack?” she asks. She has hers.

I shake my head. 

“That’s why you should get good grades,” she replies, “no one questions why you’re taking your backpack with you to the bathroom.”

And, I add in my head, everyone will assume she has a good reason for skipping next period. It’s a level 3 drop. We will be skipping next period.

The hike to the drop site is more difficult than anticipated. The sidewalks are full of slush and ice. Step too quickly, and the slush sprays all over, into the tops of our boots and down to our socks. Step without looking, and we risk slipping on the ice and falling into the wet snow. 

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

It’s not that I really care about my clothes getting wet or looking nice. I just don’t want to mess up my electronics. That would make the game unplayable. And the game must be playable. 

The drop site itself is in the middle of a park, coincident with a large, three-story metal rocket ship that kids can play in. No one has been to the playground since the two feet of snow fell last week. The snow is smooth, sparkly, and untracked. I pull my feet up above my knee with every big, slow step. I lead. Sam follows in the path of my deep footprints. 

Time is running out, so we log in as we walk. I pull out my avatar, swap the Laser Blade for a Buckyball Net and Photonic Prodder and then, just because I can as a level 32 player, I switch my outfit to reflective metallic cloth, a sweet-looking suit of silver that reflects both lasers and ambient light to make me look like a camouflaged Predator. I picked it up by defeating a spaceship in a special group battle back at level 24.

Then I run into a tree. 

It can happen when I’m in-game. My head is down, looking at the screen. I try to stay alert to my surroundings, noticing the snow and real world out of my peripheral vision. But I run into the tree, klonk my head, and Sam runs into me from behind. Snow shakes out of the branches and falls all over us.

“Ow!” I say.

“It’s starting,” she replies.

She’s right. No time to suffer. The throbbing knot on my forehead will turn into a large lump a few hours from now, but there’s no time to feel the pain. There’s a battle to be won.

I set the screen to Simplified Reality, not because it looks any better than Augmented Reality, but because it requires less processing power, which gives me a split second advantage when I start catching aliens. Personally, I think SR looks pretty sweet, as the entire world turns into a simple cartoon. When I hold the screen up toward the rocket ship playground structure, a little wisp of smoke curls out of the tail of the ship, as if preparing for launch. Sure, the same effect exists in AR mode, but that subtle graphic would be lost in the glare of the snow.

The spaceship pops into our dimension (that is, appears on a screen refresh) and hovers just above the nose of the playground rocket. Lights blink in sequence around the round body. A spinner. That’s a good thing. Valuable aliens tend to drop out of spinners. And valuable aliens mean high XP gains. Maybe level 33 will come early.

Ropes drop from the underside. They are supposed to be high-tech, fancy space cables of some sort, but in effect they are just ropes, and that means the drop will be either Robofloppers, Calctubes, or…

Spiders! The best of all possibilities. High XP gains, if you can catch them. 

The spiders (Yeah, yeah, I know, technically they are SpIDS, smarty pants, but do you know what it stands for? I do. Space Indigenous Defense Systems.) scamper down the ropes and land on the ground. I start swinging and my overpowered Buckyball Net scoops up two or three at a time. I’m clearing the ground at first, but soon there are too many. Even swinging at my fastest, more spiders land than I can capture. I don’t even need the Prodder. Already, even with both of us catching at full effort, some spiders manage to scamper away from our grasp, running toward the trees and out of range.

My portable cage is getting full. I should empty it.

It takes a few seconds to empty the cage. The game goes through this whole animation where the aliens fall asleep and get frozen and transported into deep storage. I don’t want to waste those seconds. I don’t even have time to check my gains: XP, stardust, loot from the aliens. I definitely don’t have time to empty my cage.

But my cage is full. Should have expanded its capacity instead of wasting stardust on another silly exosuit. Sam is still swinging her arms wildly, both in game and in life. She obviously did not splurge on the special event skin. 

I have to stop. No choice. I’m about to initiate the transport, when a boss drops. 

You can’t catch a boss. But a boss can stop you from catching anything else, so you have to deal with it, subdue it, and send it scampering back to the spaceship.

I forget about the cage, and swap the Buckyball Net for my Laser Blade. I engage the boss with a few quick stabs. The boss turns toward me, allowing Sam to keep swinging and catching. It means she gets all the XP and I take some health hits, but for Sam, it’s worth it. I know she would do the same for me. 

The boss is a larger sort of spider, with enhanced stats and massive hp. I use the lure technique: swing a couple times, then back a step away. The boss engages whichever player is closest, so he keeps coming at me, leaving Sam in peace to collect as many drone spiders as she can. You don’t need a partner to clean up an invasion, but it sure does help. For exactly this reason. 

Handling a Laser Blade through the accelerometer on a phone is an art unto itself, an art I have honed through player versus player battles whenever I have found a victim willing to engage. All that practice is paying off as I swing, hit, step back, swing, hit, step back. This boss is quick, his hit target smaller than most. And he doesn’t have to contend with reality. He is not worried about tripping over a curb while walking backward.

I get him down to ten percent. Another swipe or two and he’s done. But the swingset gets in the way. The chains of the swings are right in front of me, and as I try to swing the blade into the side of the boss, my wrist collides and tangles with the cold steel chains. I switch to a Neutron Cannon. But in the seconds it takes to switch, the boss hits me twice, and the hits are big. Cannon in hand, I tap a few times, sending pulses of neutrons toward the boss and finishing him for good. 

The animation shows the boss melting into the atmosphere. With time to spare as the animation plays out, I switch the mode to AR.

In AR mode, Sam swishes back and forth. High pointed laser shields stretch off her shoulders. A red miniskirt which is supposed to be, I think, a weapon, spits fire bullets when she spins. Her real face bobs in the middle of all this extravagant artistry, and she looks exactly as if she had dropped out of a spaceship herself. I don’t have too many friends who can mop up the remains of a level 3 spider raid the way she can. 

My phone is dying. Nothing drains the battery life like real time conversion to digital overlays. I would plug it in, but the extra battery pack has snow and wet all over, and I’ll have to let it dry before trying to use it. Not sure how the wet happened. Bumping into the tree, over-exuberant playing, steps too hurried in the slush. 

It’s time to close out. I don’t think I caught enough spiders to level up. Or at least, I didn’t think I did. But as I close out the game, a medallion spins toward me. That boss was bigger than I thought, and taking him out pushed me over the edge. 

Level 33, baby. Level 33.