This article is about the book. For the unit of information, see kilobyte

Kilobyte

The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Although the prefix kilo- means 1000, the term kilobyte and symbol KB have historically been used to refer to either 1024 bytes or 1000 bytes, dependent upon context, in the fields of computer science and information...

. For the Marvel Comics supervillain, see Killobyte (comics).

Killobyte is a 1993 novel by Piers Anthony

Piers Anthony

Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob is an English American writer in the science fiction and fantasy genres, publishing under the name Piers Anthony. He is most famous for his long-running novel series set in the fictional realm of Xanth.Many of his books have appeared on the New York Times Best...

. This book explores a virtual reality

Virtual reality

Virtual reality , also known as virtuality, is a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world, as well as in imaginary worlds...

 world in the context of the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

, and although originally intended as an action-adventure story, it is more of a character study. It is a cult favourite because of its forays into virtual reality, as well as its technical inaccuracies.

The game

Killobyte is a "second generation" virtual reality game that puts players into a three-dimensional, fully sensory environment. Users are hooked up to a machine that not only simulates a range of sensations, from pain to sex, but responds to brain signals to move a player's character. The only way to exit the game and return to the real world is by selecting that option from a menu that appears within the virtual world.

The game takes place in many different settings, as players face a series of increasing challenges and accumulate points. In the tradition of role-playing games, players get some choice over their characters' appearance and abilities, and they must use logic and ingenuity to overcome each obstacle, often involving riddle

Riddle

A riddle is a statement or question or phrase having a double or veiled meaning, put forth as a puzzle to be solved. Riddles are of two types: enigmas, which are problems generally expressed in metaphorical or allegorical language that require ingenuity and careful thinking for their solution, and...

s. When encountering another character, it is not always easy to tell whether the person is a fellow player or a part of the program.

As is implied by the name (a pun on the word kilobyte

Kilobyte

The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Although the prefix kilo- means 1000, the term kilobyte and symbol KB have historically been used to refer to either 1024 bytes or 1000 bytes, dependent upon context, in the fields of computer science and information...

), the game enables users to kill or be killed. Violence is quite graphic. Players who die receive electric shocks and the feeling of being buried in a coffin, and each death is longer and more unpleasant than the last one.

Plot summary

The novel cuts between Walter Toland, a former police officer, and Baal Curran, an angst-ridden teenage girl. Both are playing Killobyte from their own home, hooked to the network through a telephone modem

Modem

A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...

. Walter notices Baal's name on a list and initially assumes she is a man. Indeed, each of them first poses as the other sex.

Walter is learning the game as he goes, having neglected to read the instruction manual. He narrowly survives attacks by gunslingers, snakes, and runaway vehicles. Each time he destroys an enemy, he receives a point, and a door to a new setting appears. Eventually he must solve a more complicated problem when he finds himself in a women's prison, evading execution and a possible mole

Mole (espionage)

A mole is a spy who works for an enemy nation, but whose loyalty ostensibly lies with his own nation's government. In some usage, a mole differs from a defector in that a mole is a spy before gaining access to classified information, while a defector becomes a spy only after gaining access...

.

In the meantime, Baal enters a fantasy setting in which a knight must rescue a princess from an evil sorcerer in a castle guarded by a dragon. She first goes through the adventure as the knight and fails. When she tries again, this time in the role of the princess, Walter has entered the setting as the sorcerer. He captures Baal under the ruse that he is the hero, but when she makes sexual advances at him, he tells her the truth, too honorable to take advantage of her even if it is only within a game.

They begin telling each other about their real lives. In his days as a cop, he had an affair with a battered woman he was protecting, and the jealous husband ran him down with a car, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. He still has sexual feelings but is unable to perform. Baal, a plain girl despite her voluptuous appearance in the game, has Type I diabetes

Diabetes mellitus type 1

Diabetes mellitus type 1 is a form of diabetes mellitus that results from autoimmune destruction of insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas. The subsequent lack of insulin leads to increased blood and urine glucose...

 and is depressed from having recently broken up with her boyfriend, who couldn't handle her disease. She pursued the game as a way of flirting with suicide

Suicide

Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...

.

They discover that he may be capable of sex within the game, but they are interrupted by a hacker who has infiltrated the software. The hacker, who calls himself Phreak

Phreaking

Phreaking is a slang term coined to describe the activity of a culture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. As telephone networks have become computerized, phreaking has become closely...

, targets specific individuals and locks them in the game so that he can harass them. Walter receives an error message every time he attempts to return to the real world. But because of his police training, he remains calm and talks to Phreak, even though he knows his real body is in danger of eventual dehydration

Dehydration

In physiology and medicine, dehydration is defined as the excessive loss of body fluid. It is literally the removal of water from an object; however, in physiological terms, it entails a deficiency of fluid within an organism...

.

Baal temporarily quits the game after agreeing to meet Walter later in the game's next section, where they would use signals to identify each other, since they would have a different appearance. After unsuccessfully trying to get the police involved, she contacts the game's company, who want Walter to stay in the game as bait so that they can capture Phreak, who has eluded authorities for years. They give Baal a patch

Patch (computing)

A patch is a piece of software designed to fix problems with, or update a computer program or its supporting data. This includes fixing security vulnerabilities and other bugs, and improving the usability or performance...

 that will lock Phreak in the game along with Walter, so that they can force him to give the code that will free Walter.

We learn that Phreak is a 15-year-old boy whose father was part a snake handling

Snake handling

Snake handling or serpent handling is a religious ritual in a small number of Pentecostal churches in the U.S., usually characterized as rural and Holiness. The practice began in the early 20th century in Appalachia, spreading to mostly coal mining towns. The practice plays only a small part of...

 sect and died of a rattlesnake

Rattlesnake

Rattlesnakes are a group of venomous snakes of the genera Crotalus and Sistrurus of the subfamily Crotalinae . There are 32 known species of rattlesnake, with between 65-70 subspecies, all native to the Americas, ranging from southern Alberta and southern British Columbia in Canada to Central...

 bite. The mother eventually died, and Phreak is convinced that she was also killed by snakes, which he believes lurk in the shadows waiting to pounce on him. He lives in his aunt's house, secretly using his own telephone line to hack into games, but he avoids experiencing the games directly for fear of being traced, despite the temptations of online sex

Cybersex

Cybersex, also called computer sex, Internet sex, netsex, mudsex, TinySex and, colloquially, cybering, is a virtual sex encounter in which two or more persons connected remotely via computer network send each other sexually explicit messages describing a sexual experience...

.

Baal reenters the game world. Unfortunately, the next section is especially violent and unpredictable, modeled after Beirut

Beirut

Beirut is the capital and largest city of Lebanon, with a population ranging from 1 million to more than 2 million . Located on a peninsula at the midpoint of Lebanon's Mediterranean coastline, it serves as the country's largest and main seaport, and also forms the Beirut Metropolitan...

. She poses as an Israeli spy, he as a Druze

Druze

The Druze are an esoteric, monotheistic religious community, found primarily in Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan, which emerged during the 11th century from Ismailism. The Druze have an eclectic set of beliefs that incorporate several elements from Abrahamic religions, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism...

, and after several dangerous adventures they find each other, but not before Phreak catches up with them. Baal successfully sets the patch on Phreak, locking him in the game, though he has now locked her inside as well. They all end up in a prison together, and Walter tries to force the information out of Phreak, while Baal makes motions to seduce him, but he resists their methods.

Walter bombs the prison, causing their virtual deaths (so that they will no longer be imprisoned when they reappear). Walter believes that if his character dies again, he will die for real, for the electric shocks are interfering with his pacemaker

Pacemaker

An artificial pacemaker is a medical device that uses electrical impulses to regulate the beating of the heart.Pacemaker may also refer to:-Medicine:...

 and causing heart palpitation

Palpitation

A palpitation is an abnormality of heartbeat that causes a conscious awareness of its beating, whether it is too slow, too fast, irregular, or at its normal frequency. The word may also refer to this sensation itself...

s. Baal, meanwhile, is in danger of insulin shock if she does not exit the game soon. Phreak is traumatized by the game's simulated death and is terrified of experiencing it again, but he will not volunteer that information to Walter, whom he decides to kill.

They all end up in a special section called Potpourri, which mixes elements of various other sections. Baal is able to track the approximate locations of Walter and Phreak. Walter and Baal decide they are in love and want to marry if they manage to survive their current ordeal and meet in the real world. They chase Phreak across Potpourri, evading various obstacles he places in their path. Baal goes into insulin shock and her game body becomes still. Walter finally corners Phreak on a train and threatens to encase him in a box with snakes. Phreak finally relents.

Baal wakes up in a hospital, recovering from the insulin shock. She tries calling Walter, whose number she has memorized, but she gets no answer. She has her ex-boyfriend drive her across the country, and it gives him a chance to assuage his guilty conscience as he is comforted that she has found love again. Phreak has manipulated police records so that there is a phony arrest warrant on Walter, but the friends he met in Killobyte show up and refute the charges. A small party is held where Walter and Baal meet face-to-face at last.

Author's note

Anthony writes about the development of the novel and the research it required. He got the first germ of the idea in 1981, before virtual reality was invented. He was influenced by the page-turning qualities of Robert A. Heinlein

Robert A. Heinlein

Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre. He set a standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of...

's 1951 novel The Puppet Masters

The Puppet Masters

The Puppet Masters is a 1951 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein in which American secret agents battle parasitic invaders from outer space...

. He did considerable research into gaming and diabetes. His description of Baal's condition was based on several real-life cases he investigated. (Anthony himself has been diagnosed with Type II diabetes

Diabetes mellitus type 2

Diabetes mellitus type 2formerly non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus or adult-onset diabetesis a metabolic disorder that is characterized by high blood glucose in the context of insulin resistance and relative insulin deficiency. Diabetes is often initially managed by increasing exercise and...

, though the diagnosis was later called into question, as some doctors believe he may instead have chronic fatigue syndrome

Chronic fatigue syndrome

Chronic fatigue syndrome is the most common name used to designate a significantly debilitating medical disorder or group of disorders generally defined by persistent fatigue accompanied by other specific symptoms for a minimum of six months, not due to ongoing exertion, not substantially...

.) Additionally, Phreak was formed as a composite of several real-life hackers. Because of the approaching deadline, he had an assistant do the research on Beirut. As of 1991, he believed the technology described in the book would be created in the following decade.