Chapter 17: The Concept of Plastic

Lena and I leaned closer to the screen, eyes wide, breaths held. Maybe it should have occurred to me that this was almost exactly the dramatic lean-in I’d wanted for a kiss a moment ago. But in that instant, you’d have had to stick a fishhook through my lip to drag my face up from the phone screen.

I blinked first. “Is it locked up?”

“You should’ve saved up for a newer phone,” she said.

“Mine’s newer than yours.”

“That’s what worries me.”

Nothing happened on screen, and it continued not to happen.

I chewed my lip as I tapped back to the Materials window. My Air remained, but I’d lost one Plastic. I scanned the rest of the interface. A number on the top bar caught my attention. “Hey! Check out my MP.”

“You’re down one,” Lena said.

She had a hundred to burn, I only had ten, and neither of us had noticed the number move before. If anyone else had, they’d chosen not to share with the community.

MP. Mind Points, or Magic Points, depending on the game. Some developers come up with dumber backronyms. The name changes but the usage stays the same: you use them to cast spells, and when you run out, you can’t cast spells until they come back.

Had I just cast a spell?

That’s the sort of question you hate to have to ask.

“So,” Lena said. “It definitely did something.”

I nodded. “It’s tough, because I have no idea what Plastic plus Air would do in the first place.”

“Maybe you should’ve picked a different one, then.”

“What would Air do with any of them?”

“You think you got a dud... element? Reactant?” Lena flexed her fingers. I knew she’d be thinking of the flames sheathing her Third Eye avatar. “Fire, now. That reacts with anything.”

“No,” I said. “It’s done something.”

Unless the game was as shit as its UI, rather than as amazing as its graphics.

I didn’t believe that for a second, though.

Ironically, it was the wiki’s lack of information on the Reactions window that gave me so much confidence. If Reactants didn’t seem to do anything except burn our resources, they’d be a mystery that NugsFan15, who’d first captured Fire, would want solved more than anyone. Publicizing it would’ve cemented her BNF status and crowdsourced the unlocking of whatever the window did.

Instead, she’d chosen to hide the window from the rest of us. She’d given herself a head start. Which meant she’d found something worth starting on.

Third Eye’s UI always sucked. Everything cool in the game happened through the phone’s camera.

I switched apps.

First, of course, I saw Lena, resplendent where she lounged against her computer chair. She wiggled her fingers behind it and I saw the flames dance behind the mesh. Insane graphics. I panned up to her face and she blew a kiss. A puff of fire coiled from her lips and danced around them.

I laughed. “Don’t tempt me.”

Her shoulders tensed, her flames intensified, her eyes flickered.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

I panned away. Got to scan the room, right?

I said, “Huh.”

I’d found my Plastic.

It wasn’t the tarp I’d picked up from the dumpster this morning, nor the vinyl fence from the day before. It looked more like the tarp, shapeless, flexible, but without its orange color or grainy texture. It hovered in midair, unanchored, weirdly undetailed.

It reminded me of the graphics in retro 3D games, original PlayStation or Nintendo 64 stuff. Just shapes and shading, no textures. Except this had neither the PS1’s pixelation nor the N64’s blurriness, and the shading perfectly reflected the lights in the apartment and from Lena’s flames.

“Check it out,” I said.

“Already am.” I flicked a glance and saw Lena had put her Google Glass on. The smart glasses would have been much more convenient than our phones for hunting Materials, but she hadn’t worn them outside. I supposed even she paid the norms of normie society some mind. First time for everything. She asked, “What are we looking at?”

“Plastic,” I said, “I think.”

Less plastic, more the concept of Plastic.

Did the Air make it float? Not super useful, but kind of cool, I supposed.

I reached out with my free hand to see if I could reabsorb it as a Material. Infinite XP glitch, anyone? Third Eye was in beta.

Instead, with a roar of wind, the Plastic coiled into a giant mitt and mimicked my gesture.

“Holy shit!” Lena thrust her hands out, but nothing happened.

Because she didn’t have any Air, or because this unit of Plastic obeyed mine? We couldn’t test, not yet. We needed to test! We needed to get more Air. I’d let Lena have it, no question, and then we’d see how they interacted. She’d get first crack at Fire, too. Water for me, though.

God, I wanted to find Water.

Back in the moment, I crooked my hand and the wind whipped the Plastic toward us. Not into contact, although we both flinched back.

I turned a goofy grin Lena’s way and she flashed one back.

“We’re freaking out,” I said, “but isn’t this really just an AR version of a Kinect game –”

She poked me in the ribs. “Don’t you ruin this, Cam!”

I laughed and clamped my mouth shut. I held my hand out flat, palm up like a waiter, and the Plastic formed a sort of floating tablecloth. I wiggled my fingers and it rippled.

“There was never a Kinect game this cool,” Lena said.

“No. No there was not.” I poked one finger up, flipping off the ill-fated motion sensing peripheral. Wind whipped upwards in a vortex and the Plastic made a little mountain. “Well, maybe Steel Battalion 3.”

“It didn’t even work!”

“The idea of it, though.”

“The first two were cooler.”

“If you like spending more on a peripheral than on your console.” The first two Steel Battalion games tried to sell a huge control panel with foot pedals and extra buttons to mimic a mecha’s cockpit. The third entry tried to let players use the Kinect to touch a virtual version. The first two worked but cost a fortune, three just didn’t work. I considered all of them cool.

As I swished the Plastic back and forth with a wave of my hand, though, I had to admit this seemed cooler.

If it had just formed its amorphous mass into a replica of my hand, it wouldn’t have been. Still super cool, to be clear, just not quite “really feel like you’re piloting a mecha” cool.

What made Third Eye’s implementation of motion control so amazing, at least to me, was that the Plastic didn’t mimic me perfectly. The wind moved with my gestures and let the floating Plastic react to the force it generated.

The results didn’t seem realistic, exactly. The Plastic didn’t fall to the ground without my input, but nor did it keep moving when I stopped imparting force to it, the way it would in zero gravity. It was like a constant, implausibly steady wind tunnel underneath it kept it in place, and others formed and vanished at my command.

“Lena,” I said, “I think you should try to touch it.”

She shot me a glance. “You sure? What if I absorb it?”

“We’ll learn something.” Even if one player couldn’t access an infinite XP glitch, two might be able to by passing a Material back and forth. At least for as long as their MP held out.

Lena shrugged and nodded.

She stepped forward. As interesting and impressive as I found the Plastic, I had to admit it looked pretty shitty compared to the magnificent detail of her avatar. Although the reflections on the surface of the Plastic still looked fantastic.

She held her hand out. Her wings stretched as her arms did. At some point, I really needed to look closer at how they attached to her back. They appeared to spring from her fiery dress, but they moved like realistic muscles tied to the rest of her body.

For now, I cupped my fingers and curled the Plastic around her.

It wrapped over her. With such a bright light hidden beneath it, it became semi-transparent, rendering Lena’s curves and angles as an outline of light. Between the glowing silhouette of a delicate body and the wings arching up from it, she truly looked like an angel.

“Mrgh!” She cried, her voice muffled, strangled. “Knt breeff!”