Jared looked up from the article on his computer screen, and the world froze for a moment.
An idea started to percolate in Jared’s brain. A crazy idea. An idea only a man with a high-grade glioblastoma multiforme could possibly have. He would auction his life—not his things, but his actual life—on eBay. The euthanasia lobby was pressuring him to take a position on a proposed expansion to Oregon’s right-to-die laws; he would become their poster boy. Jared Stone, for sale to the highest bidder—do with him as you please.
PART ONE
Meet the Bidders
Tuesday, September 15
9d 9h 14m
Hazel Huck liked games. She liked them a lot.
She liked games of skill (chess and crossword puzzles), she liked games of chance (Yahtzee and Risk), but the games she liked best of all were role-playing games. From the off-line worlds of Dungeons & Dragons to the online universes of EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, and World of Warcraft, Hazel liked nothing better than to lose herself in someone else’s skin. To be a giant elf warrior with 150 hit points was to be invincible; she spent every free moment she was allowed living in those worlds. It was how she fought against the ebb and flow of her daily grind.
Hazel was a square peg in a round hole. From a well-to-do family in Huntsville, Alabama, she should have, at seventeen years old, been preparing for her debutante ball. Her classmates at the Florence Nightingale School for Young Women seemed obsessed with their coming-out parties. But not Hazel. To her, the notion of officially entering society seemed anachronistic at best and embarrassing at least. Her parents, attorneys with a practice focusing on maritime law, were disappointed but respected their daughter’s independence.
Other than schoolwork and family obligations—chores, visits with aunts and uncles, mandatory attendance at church on Sundays—Hazel lived in a virtual world. Her closest friends were members of her Warcraft guild. And why not? They were interesting. She’d never met them, but she knew more about them than she did any of the girls at school. One was a middle-aged businessman from New York; another a high school girl from Bolivia; another claimed to be a published science fiction author, though he (she?) would never reveal the names of his (her?) books, stories, or publishers. It didn’t matter. You could be who or what you wanted in that world, not only in the characters you played but in the stories you told.
In her first foray into online gaming, Hazel was nervous about her own story—or what she thought was her own lack of story—so she made one up. She claimed to be in graduate school studying English literature at a university “somewhere in Europe.” Other people seemed impressed, and before she knew it, there was no escape from her lie. To make her online persona seem plausible, she conducted exhaustive research into the most important English lit doctoral programs in the UK and France. She was always ready with some new tidbit of information to support her tale. Over time, she came to believe that this character—whom she publicly called Tess—really did exist. It was too late to tell people she was a high school student—a freshman when she first spun this particular yarn and now a senior—from Alabama. She embraced the fiction and let the lie stand.
Hazel was casting a Circle of Healing spell when an instant message from a Warcraft friend popped on the screen. The IM said:
Can you believe this? ROTFL!
and included a link to Jared’s eBay listing.
But Hazel wasn’t laughing.
***
Ethan Overbee liked his executive assistant, Monique. He liked her a lot.
He liked the way she would anticipate his need to reschedule a meeting. He liked how she knew which of his underlings were allowed access to him, on which days, and how long they were to be left waiting in his anteroom. And he liked how she always seemed able to deflect calls from his girlfriend, or his mother, or his sister. But most of all, Ethan Overbee liked the things Monique would do for him when he closed the door to his Santa Monica office.
It never occurred to Ethan that he made Monique feel like a high-priced prostitute, and that her sense of self-worth was so permanently destroyed she couldn’t even look in the mirror without wanting to throw up. It never occurred to him because it couldn’t. Unlike Jared Stone, Ethan Overbee was a man completely and utterly devoid of empathy.