Lud·dite | ˈlədˌīt |noun

1. DEROGATORY

a person opposed to new technology or ways of working.

Chapter 1

The half-orc gripped her naginata with both hands and stepped from behind the yew tree. Despite her size, she moved with feline fluidity. Her ebony recurve bow, the hatchet that hung from her belt, and every item of survival she carried moved silently with her, the selection and position of each honed during an existence largely spent alone in the wild tracking prey, whether four-legged or two. Her well-worn leather boots made no sound as she crept across the spongy soil toward the stump. Emerging from the cool shadows, the warmth of the morning sun crawled up her leggings then tunic, finally finding the scarred skin of her face, which was the gray of tarnished pewter. Her eyes narrowed to slits, and as she approached her target, she lowered the naginata’s blade to float suspended at the height of his neck.

There she paused, the blade an inch short of its mark, almost tickling the furry black hairs now close enough to see.

Arms straight down, palms pressed against the sun-bleached wood to either side of his brown breeches, the halfling sat on the squat stump in the middle of the clearing and gazed at his bare feet, which swung back and forth through the grass. He shook his head, looked up into the blue sky, and breathed deeply the dewy smells carried by the breeze. “Not a cloud…,” he said and giggled.

The half-orc scowled, her drawn lips exposing grooved, yellowed teeth, stained nearly black where they erupted chaotically from scarlet gums.

The halfling turned slightly, leaned his weight onto his left hand, and hooked the thumb of his right into the wine-colored suspender stretching over his dusty white shirt. The suspender slipped off his thumb and snapped crisply against his chest, which prompted another giggle.

In the time it took a fluffy cottonwood seed to make a wind-borne crossing of the clearing, the mismatched pair did not move, balanced on the inch of space between blade and neck.

Able to hold her anger no longer, the half-orc raised the naginata high in the air, the gently curved steel blade on its end nearly as long as the halfling was tall.

“Grraahhhhyyaaaaaayayayaya!”

The halfling and the half-orc flinched in unison at the shriek from their right.

The half-orc turned to find a charging goblin, mouth specked with spittle, grayish-green skin spattered with mud, waist wrapped in the ragged skin of a former victim, hands clenched around the grips of two roughly hewn wooden knives.

Turning and glimpsing the scene, the halfling let loose a shrill scream of terror that collided with the goblin’s cry in discordant waves that caused the half-orc to raise her shoulders as though to cover her ears, even as she swung her naginata down to meet the charging attacker. The half-orc’s eyes met those of the goblin but held there for only a second before both pairs of eyes widened in surprise as the halfling threw himself between the three brandished blades, his arms extended—a minuscule, unarmed, suspendered meat shield.

With a greedy grin and still at full sprint, the goblin plunged both knives into the halfling’s belly, crashed into its collapsing victim, felt its knives wrenched from its hands, tumbled forward, landed on its back, and looked up into the half-orc’s face, backlit by the brilliant sky. Now unarmed, a cry of defiance rose in its throat but traveled no further before the naginata cleaved its grime-smeared body diagonally from shoulder to hip.

The halfling lay on the ground and shivered with shock. He jerkily turned his head toward the goblin’s carcass and screamed once more when he saw viscera sliding wetly out of the halves into the gap between.

The half-orc’s boot squashed the pile of goblin innards as she stepped forward to stand over the halfling. She bent to scowl into his face, a face clenched so tight and purple as to look like a dried plum. She growled, a deep sound that seemed to originate in the ground and rise through her before spreading through the clearing and into the surrounding woods. All birdsong fell silent.

Turning wild eyes to stare into the face of the half-orc, the halfling gasped.

“What,” the half-orc said, her ragged, strained voice starting deep but rising with every word, “on Earth did you think you were doing, Dad?” She stood straight and squealed in frustration, her free hand resting on her iron-studded leather belt. She looked back down at him. “And why are you smiling?”

Tears of pain ran past both temples, but the halfling’s smile widened. “Just seeing you standing there, Evie, talking to me, it’s so wonderful.”

“Yeah, standing, talking, wonderful, I get it. But, ohmagod, seriously?” She shook her head. “You ask me to show you the Stealth Skill I’ve been working on,” she dropped the tip of her blade to point at the goblin halves, “but you don’t pay any attention until this thing goes berserk? You wouldn’t have noticed a plate-armor-wearing Level 1 Giant with a Dexterity debuff sneaking up on you.”

“You know I’m no good at any of this, Evie.” With each word, the halfling gasped shallowly as he stared into the sky, pupils tiny pinpricks against the cloudless day. “But, gosh, it really is just all so amazing. Have you stopped to look at it? Feel it? The sun? The breeze?” He coughed, and liquid gurgled deep in his chest. He clenched his eyes from the pain. “Sweet Baby James, these things hurt.” He raised his head slightly and gazed at his round belly, out of which the handles of the wooden shanks still protruded like serving knives from a cheese ball.

“You couldn’t keep watch for five minutes? Five minutes! And you and Mom worry about me having ADHD?” The half-orc let out a long, rising grunt. “Now, please tell me why you threw yourself in front of the goblin. I had that, but instead, you’re a pincushion.”

The halfling shook his head almost imperceptibly. “I saw that thing running at my little girl and, before I could think, I just panicked and dove.”

“Little girl?” The half-orc leaned down and stomped one foot. “I am thirteen! And you may hover over me all the time IRL, but we’re in here. Look at me!” She stood straight and gestured to her towering half-orc avatar before rolling her eyes up to stare into the sky. Trying to protect me from a Level 1 Goblin, she thought. Him. Protect me. In here. So typical. So, so typical. “On top of all that,” she dropped her gaze to a second stump, unoccupied, an arm’s length from the first, “where is Mom?”

The halfling coughed again, and drops of frothy blood landed on his face, neck, and collar. “She remembered something she wanted to tell you, so she went to find you.”

“What?! I told you both to wait here and try to catch me sneaking up on you. The whole point was that I was going to be coming right back!”

“She said it was important. Something about Mrs. Jacobs’ cat.”

“This is not happening.” The half-orc bit her lip and stared across the clearing for a moment. “Which way did she go?”

The muscles in the halfling’s neck became prominent as he strained to look past his spasming stomach. He pointed a finger sticky with blood toward a trail that left the clearing toward the north.

“That’s not even the way I went when I left you!” The half-orc clenched the shaft of her naginata so tightly the wood creaked a complaint, but, when she looked back to the halfling and saw his health draining as rapidly as the blood from his belly, she forgot her frustration, squatted, and let her weapon fall to the side. Nearly the entire front of his shirt was wet with blood as dark as his ridiculous suspenders. “Listen, Dad, in a few seconds you’re going to respawn—“

“Respawn?”

“—ugh—reappear at the same spot where we first showed up a little while ago.”

“Yes?”

“Down by the stream? At the bottom of the ravine that we hiked up out of?”

“Yes?”

“Stay there. Do not leave the spawn point. Do you understand? It’ll take me a few minutes to get back down there, even if I don’t find Mom first. Don’t move. Don’t touch anything. Don’t eat anything. Don’t even look at anything. Just stand still where you reappear, OK?”

“But,” the halfling’s words were faint, and the half-orc leaned closer to hear, “I don’t want you to be all alone out here—“

“I will be fine! Stay there!”

“OK, OK.”

The half-orc nodded and sat back on her heels. She exhaled a slow breath, lay her forearms across her knees, and let her gaze unfocus and settle among the trees on the far side of the clearing.

“How about,” the halfling whispered, and the half-orc looked down at him, “I just start back toward you. I’ll follow the same path we took down the stream…”

“No!” The half-orc’s shout was accompanied by a soft chime, and the Party Log inset in her User Interface indicated:

Reavyr (II) has died. Respawn in 30 seconds.

The half-orc tilted forward onto her knees and dropped her hands to the trampled grass and dirt, still damp from dew that was now mixing with blood. She looked at her father’s lifeless avatar, then her head sagged low between her shoulders and she closed her eyes. “What is wrong with my parents?” She said quietly. She glanced at the goblin. “Overprotective-much?” Her head hung another moment, then she jerked it up and lunged sideways to grab her naginata, rose to her feet, and looked to the north. She did not know where that trail lead and did not know how long her mother would follow it before making another poor choice. She could track her, but it would probably take time. She looked to the west. She did know where her father would respawn, and he would be there in less than thirty seconds. She tried to remember the goofy saying he had—a bird in hand something something?

She ran toward the west.

In real life, Reeve Williams wouldn’t have had the strength to lift her avatar’s naginata, let alone lug it across the clearing, but Reeve’s half-orc was three hand-lengths taller than a human, and her long strides had her into the dense woods before either of the bodies she’d left behind began to sink out of existence like wet sandcastles melting back into a beach. She followed a game trail that soon steepened as it reached the bank of a ravine, and the pace of her run increased. With the exertion, her turbulent sea of thoughts began to calm, but from the quieting surface rose a single word like an unwelcome leviathan that wrapped her in clammy tentacles and squeezed her chest tight.

Luddite.

She had learned the word on a Monday in 4th Grade, 3rd Period, Social Studies. As Ms. Welsh explained the history of the word, her classmates sat around her, bored, unmoved, but Reeve watched images flash before her from a lifetime of checkout lines backing up behind her father while he wrote physical checks and of teenagers standing on their front porch, disbelieving, as her mother wrote her AOL.com email address on a clipboard holding some idealistic petition. In a world dependent on, thriving from, and addicted to technology, Reeve Williams, who felt more herself in vivid virtual reality than in depressing real reality, was frozen to the hard plastic of her elementary school seat by the realization that her parents, Walter and Wanda Williams, were Luddites.

Reeve dodged an exposed rock jutting from the steep slope, and the tension that always formed in her chest when thinking of her parent’s technological indifference and ineptitude loosened fractionally. She continued weaving between sharp rocks and prickly undergrowth, any of which could send her plummeting to a painful death at the bottom of the ravine, and the immediacy of her daredevil run caused her anxiety to fade further. She even began to smile, as she almost always did when enjoying the physical freedom her avatar gave her. Her fleet feet carried her within yards of squirrels, birds, a boar, and a bobcat before they realized she was there and already gone.

The leviathan resubmerged, and Reeve shook her head at how worked up she’d gotten in the clearing. Yeah, sure, agreeing to show her Luddite parents this new VR system had been a massive mistake. She should have made some excuse, any excuse, to keep them out. But everything would be OK—she’d get back to the spawn, convince her dad that they’d seen enough, log herself out, and then log both parents out from the lobby.

Everything would be OK.