Killobyte (Piers Anthony)

Killobyte
Piers Anthony
Ace
Fiction, Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Walter Toland used to be a beat cop, until an encounter with a vengeful, abusive man left him in a wheelchair. Jobless, virtually immobile, prisoner of a body too damaged to even walk, his real life was as good as over. Then he discovered the emerging world of virtual gaming. With sensory hookups, it provides an immersive, realistic experience as good as - or even better than - anything in reality. He was never much of a gamer before his accident, but in the world of Killobyte he rediscovers the thrills, the fears, the sheer joy of living an active life.
18-year-old Baal Curran plays Killobyte not for the adventure of living, but to flirt with dying. Ostracized from friends and classmates by chronic illness, her heart shattered by the one boy who looked beyond the social stigma, she tells herself she's not suicidal, yet can't help wondering about the many deaths offered by the simulated worlds... and whether any of them can make up her mind to keep living her worthless life.
When Walter and Baal meet in a fantasy adventure simworld of Killobyte, sparks fly... until a hacker named Phreak turns up. He gets his kicks by locking players out of their own log-out commands, effectively trapping them online, while he torments them. Being trapped in the game isn't just a joke for these two players, though - wheelchair-bound Walter needs daily medical assistance, and Baal needs insulin shots to keep from dropping into a diabetic coma. Only Phreak knows the code that would release them... but why should he let his latest toys go? Thus begins a game more serious than any played before on Killobyte's servers, a virtual game whose stakes are literally life and death.

REVIEW: I'm not much of a Piers Anthony fan, but I found this for a buck at Half Price Books. I figured it would be worth a buck to try. Written in 1993, the technology described feels distinctly anachronistic; players immerse in full virtual reality with futuristic prosthetic sensory simulators, yet rely on telephone lines for modem transmissions. But it's hardly Anthony's fault that gaming and internet technology have developed in unanticipated ways. Looking beyond that, the story itself is pretty much what I figured it would be, a relatively simple adventure with characters just deep enough to fill out the roles assigned to them. Several stretches of prolonged backstory and explanatory infodumps bog down the plot. Still, it read fairly fast, without Anthony's usual reliance on pun-heavy humor, and I didn't actively hate anyone (except for the hacker Phreak, naturally.) I paid a dollar for it, and it killed a day. That's about all I asked of it, and it delivered.

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