MetaWars: Fight For The Future

Chapter 8

Jonah felt a sickening surge in his head.

Images were flashing behind his eyelids, too fast for

him to make out what any of them might be. He had a giddy sensation of falling, and for an instant he feared he might fall out of the Metasphere altogether.

He tried to let go, but his hands clenched uncontrollably around the talons. The dragon depixelated from head to tail and a rush of red cascaded towards him. Each new pixel sliced into Jonah like a shard of glass.

The pain subsided and Jonah came to his senses in the secret cellar of the gift shop, on his knees, trembling and flushed, fighting down a tidal wave of nausea. In the body of the red dragon. His father’s body.

He could feel the dragon’s wings behind him, like an extra pair of arms. He flexed his shoulders, unfolded the wings, spread them out until their tips touched the cellar walls. He put his hands – his claws, he supposed he should call them now – to his face, felt around the shape of his snout and gingerly touched his sharp teeth.

He still felt sick, a little dizzy, and somehow the world seemed smaller to him – although of course Jonah knew it was he who had grown bigger.

Jonah couldn’t see his own avatar, his humatar, in front of him.

With a sense of trepidation, Jonah shuffled around to look behind him. He felt too big now, unable to turn his great, trunk-like neck, hardly able to move at all in this too-small space. His avatar wasn’t there. It had gone, disappeared.

Jonah began to panic.

How could he have been so stupid? Everyone knew the penalty for filtering, for taking another avatar as your own. Exile. Jonah’s DNA would be placed on a block list, forever denied access to the Metasphere. He would be forced to live out his life in the real world, never see his friends again because he didn’t know where to find them or even what they looked like.

It would be like dying. No, it would be worse than that. At least if I were dying, he thought, I could be Uploaded.

Jonah had to get out of there – out of the Metasphere – before anyone found out what he had done. He flew up out of the cellar, through the gift shop door, and back towards his Point of Origin. As he flew, his new wings gave him power and lift that he’d never experienced in humatar form. He soared towards his school, terrified that someone he knew – or worse, who had known his father – would see him.

His golden exit halo hovered in the Chang Academy grounds, where he had left it. It was only one of many, but it glowed at Jonah’s approach as if beckoning him towards it.

It still recognises me, he thought with relief. The halo was his only way out of the Metasphere, the only way to reconnect his conscious mind with his unconscious body. Without it, Jonah’s avatar would be trapped in the Metasphere forever, while his physical body slowly wasted away in the real world.

He dived through the ring of light.

Jonah was back on the bus, in the meta-pub. He was trapped once more in his awkward, real-world body – and, for once, he was thankful for this.

He was a little alarmed to find Mr Collins crouched beside him, frowning over a datapad. ‘Was everything all right for you in there, son?’ he asked.

Jonah didn’t dare answer him. He just nodded dumbly.

‘I think we must have a software glitch,’ Mr Collins explained. ‘For a while there, the system was showing two avatars registered to this terminal, which of course ain’t possible. I’ve reported the error, but I’m gonna have to run some scans. Can’t afford a virus on the loose.’