The Johns took a step back, staring wide-eyed. Jeremy held up his fists, dancing on his legs, uncertain. In an instant, Jay leapt forward and grabbed his shirt. Jeremy’s hands fell away, and Jay lifted him off the ground so that his feet were dangling in midair. He watched with satisfaction as Jeremy’s face turned red. He raised a fist, ready to pummel him, strength surging through his veins. Then he heard a noise in the yard across the street. Two kids peered through a metal fence, watching eagerly. Jay felt his adrenaline ebb. He lowered his fist.
Everything went quiet.
It was as if his ears had suddenly stopped working. All the ambient sounds were gone. The heavy breath of the Johns. A distant lawnmower. A truck shifting down on Main Street. All of the noise disappeared.
Jay glanced back at the kids across the street. Their hands were frozen on the fence, faces blank and unseeing.
Around him, John D and John S were frozen in mid-stride. John H was doubled over, arms wrapped around his stomach. Jeremy’s face was frozen red, his lower jaw stuck at an odd angle, one eye half shut. He looked like a paused frame on a VHS. Jay released his grip, and Jeremy remained where he was, frozen in midair.
“Jay!”
Liz ran down the front steps of her house. Her mom was frozen, hands covering her eyes, and her dad was trapped in a long stride back up the steps.
Liz reached Jay and grabbed his shoulder. “Did you do this?”
Jay shook his head. Even the wind had stopped. Trees were frozen to one side, as if held down by a massive gust. He glanced up. Directly above, a bird hovered in mid-flight, wings outstretched. Jay could see a small white blotch suspended in the air above him. Bird poop, frozen in the sky.
Someone coughed.
Another figure strolled down the road toward them. It was a man about Jay’s height, but pear-shaped. He wore khaki shorts, sandals, and a fanny pack. His thick owl glasses were fixated on Jay.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Liz didn’t respond. Jay looked over his shoulder. Liz was gone. Jay spun around, searching. She wasn’t among all the frozen bodies. She had vanished.
The man’s footsteps left the road and crunched over the gravel. He was smiling, though the effort seemed to strain him. Jay shrunk back. He stopped a few feet away and reached a hand into his fanny pack to pull out a black metal cylinder. He twirled it in his fingers and nodded at Jeremy.
“Finish him.”
Hal
“What?” Jay blinked.
The man smiled. “Oh, that’s right. Mortal Kombat isn’t scheduled to come out until December. Tell Colin to get the Genesis version; I’ll make sure GamePro has the blood code. ‘Finish him’ translates loosely into ‘kill him in a spectacular manner.’ Like the gladiators used to.”
Jay felt his stomach drop.
“K-kill Jeremy?” he whispered.
“Like the thought’s never crossed your mind. What did you mean to happen when you unleashed that tornado? I know you’ve thought about using other disasters. Sending an earthquake, a riot, a downed plane, a flood. Or releasing the monster. So be a man. Do it with your hands.”
“Do I . . . do I know you?”
The man continued to smile. “You can call me Hal. Like Paul Simon.”
There was something familiar about Hal’s low voice and stilted manner of speaking. Then Jay realized how he recognized him. “You’re Marvelous Mark!”
The man’s smile grew pink with pleasure. He nodded. “I’m many things. You might also recognize my photo in Serious Gamer? It’s a little grainy . . .”
Jay thought back to the editor’s letter he looked forward to every month. His mind’s eye conjured the loopy signature of the editor.
“You’re Hal?”
“I’m pleased that you’ve taken my recommendations so seriously.”
“I’ve got a mixtape of your music. And I’ve bought all your game recommendations. Even . . .”
Jay remembered the issue he’d received on his birthday. The one with the floppy of The Build.
“You sent me The Build.”
Hal grinned. “I think you’ll find, Jay, you can trace a lot of your interests back to me. I wear lots of hats. Editor. DJ. City planner. You might say that I built this city,” Hal giggled, “on rock and roll.”
Jay’s eyes widened. Hal nodded.
“Yes, it’s a game. Though I feel that undersells the experience. This is a playground, Jay. Your playground.”
Jay felt sick. The terrible truth of Bickleton was staring him down, and he couldn’t look away. All the rage he’d ever felt living in this stupid town came roiling up in his chest and he clenched his fists, shouting.
“I’m an NPC in a video game!? Everything I’ve been doing, learning—the spotted owls, the World Trade Center bombing, Twin Peaks . . . none of it’s real?”
Hal’s smile shrank.
“That’s a glass-half-empty view. I didn’t build this in a week, you know. This is not some half-assed app. This is a real world, as real as the one I live in. And reality’s not half as fun.
“Here’s life.” He held a stubby finger in the air. “If life in reality were a line graph, it’d go like this.” He drew a short, sharp rise, then a gradual decline. “Party at the front; depression, despair, death at the back. But not you. You get the inverse. Your life is gonna look like this.” He drew a flat line in the air that suddenly skyrocketed. “Up and up and up. And the best part? It never has to end.”
Hal’s smile returned to the look of shock on Jay’s face. “That’s right. The rules are different for you. No molecular breakdown of cells. No aging, outside of the algorithms I’ve written, and algorithms can be tweaked. You can live here forever, if you’d like.”
Jay’s queasiness doubled. He bent over, running his fingers through his hair, trying not to vomit. The thought of living for eternity . . . in Bickleton . . .
“But I don’t want to stay here at all!” he gasped. “All I’ve ever wanted was to leave.”
Hal chuckled. “Just you wait. You’ll find that Bickleton isn’t so bad. Don’t limit yourself to cliché ideas of what high school is or has been. Use your imagination. Show me something marvelous.”
“Like what?”
“That baseball game! One high school loner takes on the whole team. Give me more of that! Give Jeremy and the Johns what they deserve. You’ve barely scratched the surface of what you can do.”
Jay’s mind reeled with questions.
“Why now? Why, all of a sudden, are you giving me this?” His voice cracked with emotion. “Why not in eighth grade, when John D threw me in the trash can? Or in sixth grade, when Jeremy held my face down in the gravel and let his little sister beat me up? Why didn’t you just make me strong to begin with? Why did you give me this body?!”
Hal chuckled. “If I would’ve given you this power from the beginning, you would’ve ended up like another Jeremy. Or worse. You needed to know pain. I’m sorry, but you had to suffer. Like I did in high school. I would have given anything for the gift you have. In fact, you’ll never know just how much I’ve given. Trust me. For the rest of your long, long life, you’ll look back on these last eighteen years, and you’ll laugh. You’ll thank me, because I showed you what life is like for most people, and then I delivered you from it. I have given you something so much better.”
“Why me? Why not Colin, or Stevie?”
“Because you’re like me. You feel things deeply, Jay. You’re a hopeless romantic, as I was.” Hal’s gaze slackened. “I had a Jeremy of my own back in my high school. A Colin. A Liz. The only thing I didn’t have was someone to help me.” He gave Jay a thin smile. “I don’t think you realize how lucky you are.”
“What happens to Liz? She said you put her in here.”
“She and I have an arrangement. Right now, she’s plugged in. Her brain is running her
character, controlling her avatar. But while that’s happening, The Build is running a program on her brain. It’s mapping her mind, learning her personality, how she makes decisions. In two days’ time, it will have what it needs. On prom night, she’ll be liberated.”
“You mean . . . you’re copying her brain?”
Hal nodded.
“In forty-eight hours, her mind will be completely mapped into code. Liz’s avatar will switch from being player-controlled to an NPC. The AI engine is so good, you won’t even notice when it happens.”
“And the real Liz goes free?”
The wrinkles on Hal’s pockmarked face turned up around his eyes. “Why, sure. My experiment will be complete, and they’ll be no need for her to stay. She can go back to her life.”
Jay studied Hal’s face, looking for any hint of doubt or malevolence. Hal smiled right back through beady eyes.
“Like I said, she and I have an arrangement. I’m not a monster, Jay.”
“Yeah? Then what happened to Todd?”
Hal sighed. “Well, first, Todd was an NPC, so there’s an ethical distinction, in my opinion. If a character lives solely in the code of my game, if I created him, then I have a right to do what I want. So I removed him. But I know you two used to be friends, so I can bring him back, if that’s important. I know the morality of my logic may not seem so cut-and-dried, from in here.”
Jay’s voice wavered, uncertain of his standing with this man. “Could we bring him back?”
“I’ll add that to the queue. Anything else?”
Jay thought of his best friend’s dazed look during their conversation in the Mark parking lot.
“Why do people tune out when I try to explain The Build?”
Hal smiled. “When I was a kid, we used to go to this place called Northwest Trek. It was a zoo housing the regional animals. Elk, wolves, moose, bison, cougar. We’d ride a tram through the park.”
Jay saw a sudden glimpse of a tram riding over a wooded hill.
“They did such a good job hiding the park’s perimeter, and I loved that we couldn’t see the edges, where the wolf enclosure ended, where the bison pen began. See, all the moats and walls were camouflaged. I tried to do the same here. I tried to give everyone full free will, while also keeping them within the town, through hidden seams. But that didn’t pan out. Teenage curiosity is a helluva force. Kids kept trying to leave, trying to poke through what I built, find the seams. So I had to build a constraint. It makes NPCs a little less lifelike, I suppose, but it keeps everyone from picking at the loose strands of their reality.
“Here’s the rub: there’s a chunk of code that keeps the good folk of Bickleton from thinking too hard about certain ideas or concepts. Such as leaving Bickleton. Or any idea that comes too close to the truth. Whenever someone has one of those ideas, well, they just . . . switch off for a bit.”
Jay nodded, thinking back to his mom’s, Ms. Molouski’s, and Principal Oatman’s slackened gazes when he’d brought up The Build. But then he remembered Liz.
“So I can talk to Liz because she’s a real player?”
Hal nodded. “And you can talk to me.”
“And I can contemplate all that stuff? I don’t have that . . . constraint?”
“Like I said, you’re special. I made some exceptions for you. You wouldn’t have been able to use my birthday present if those parameters applied to you.”
Jay shook his head, frustration rising.
“You decide who’s born, who dies? You can change how we think or what we do, take away our free will whenever you feel like it? Sounds like a pretty stupid game.”
Again, Hal tensed.
“No no no. You can’t think about it like that. You have to treat it like it’s real; that’s the only way it will be fun. It does mean something. It means what you want it to.”
“How am I supposed to treat it like it’s real? I’m just supposed to keep it to myself, pretend like high school is normal? I can’t even hang out with my best friend now, because you’ve programmed him to ignore all the stuff I’m going through.”
Hal’s face fell again. He looked anguished. “Well, I can’t just turn those parameters off. People will get stuck. You should have seen it before, in earlier versions. They’d set up camp at the edge of the map, wouldn’t leave for days. If I let you tell them the truth, we don’t know what the ramifications would be. If everyone in town could actually contemplate that they were in a simulation . . . I mean, can you imagine?”
Jay crossed his arms. “I have to tell someone.”
Hal fidgeted, staring at the ground. He began to pace back and forth, running his hands through his horseshoe ring of hair, mouth screwed into a grimace, muttering. Jay worried about the sudden change. In a matter of seconds, Hal’s confidence and gloating had dissolved into anxiety. He seemed to be in genuine agony, struggling with a decision. Finally, he grumbled:
“All right. I’ll change the code so you can tell your friends. But if it causes existential panic—”
“I promise I’ll only tell Colin.”
Hal nodded begrudgingly. “Okay. But in return, I want fireworks.”
“Fireworks?”
“Yeah. Enjoy yourself. More than just a Miata and a baseball game.”
He pointed at where Jeremy hung frozen in midair. “Finish him.”
Jay followed Hal over to Jeremy. Jeremy’s red face was still staring at the spot where Jay had been standing. Jay felt the usual disgust for his tormentor, but it was less urgent now. Jeremy was programmed to torment Jay. Jay wondered at that existence. What did it feel like to be Jeremy? Was his mind so singular that that was all he could contemplate? He looked at Hal, whose beady eyes gleamed hungrily up at Jeremy. He looked as if he could kill him.
“I don’t . . . I can’t kill.”
“He’s earned it.”
Jay’s mind raced as he looked to stall.
“Wouldn’t that be anticlimactic, though? He’s had eighteen years to beat the shit out of me. I’m just getting started.”
Hal grinned, revealing yellow teeth. “That’s what I want to see.” He shook his head, as if surprised at himself. “I know I shouldn’t be impatient, but I’ve been working on this too long. You know how it is: you’ve put the time into Poopville. I want to see you get creative. Make him suffer.”
Jay felt sick to his stomach. He tried to smile. “I’ve got eighteen years’ worth of ideas.”
Hal didn’t seem to notice. He was twirling the black rod in his hand, impatient.
“Jay, it’s been a pleasure to finally chat. I gotta go check on the CPU temperature—gets a little hot running two player characters at the same time.”
He held out a small sweaty palm, and Jay tentatively shook it.
“I’ll let you get back to it. Till next time?”
Without waiting for Jay to respond, Hal clicked a button on his black wand and vanished. The world unpaused. Jeremy dropped onto the lawn, gasping. The wind was again howling around them. The Johns were groaning and stumbling backward. Liz stood on the lawn, wobbly and disoriented. Jay ran to her.
“What happened?”
Liz responded by vomiting into the grass.
“Ugh.” She wiped her mouth. “Hal didn’t want me to see whatever just happened.”
“He teleported you?”
Liz nodded. “What was it he didn’t want me to see?”
“Our conversation,” Jay whispered.
Bickleton’s lone patrol car turned down their small street. The Johns limped to their trucks, throwing themselves in their cabs. Engines rumbled to life and car tires squealed.
But Liz wouldn’t break Jay’s gaze.
“What did he say?”
second Player
The last of the Chevys peeled out, leaving Liz’s house silent. The only sounds were the wind a
nd Sheriff Jenkins’s car settling to a halt.
Jay looked down the street and saw window shades snap shut. The people of Bickleton, he realized, had been enjoying the high school drama. He watched Elmer haul his fat body out of the driver’s seat. His left eye was twitching mercilessly, and he held a messy sandwich in his left hand, which he must have just grabbed from Golden Flour Bakery. He was scowling.
“What did he say?” Liz repeated, her eyes still focused on Jay.
Jay’s head swam at the surreal conversation he’d just had. “He wants me to make changes. He wants me to . . .” Jay lowered his voice. “Well, he wants me to kill Jeremy.”
Mr. Knight rushed from the house. He was tall and dark-skinned, with Liz’s green eyes and a big mustache plastered across his face. He looked like a guy who’d ridden motorcycles in his youth. Liz stiffened as he approached. Elmer’s sandwich dripped ketchup and mayonnaise as he awkwardly pointed at Jay.
“Let’s talk, Banksman.”
Mr. Knight shook his head. “It wasn’t Jay’s fault. The whole baseball team ganged up on him.”
Sheriff Jenkins’s twitchy eye narrowed. “Yeah, I heard he’s a real fighter now.”
Jay leaned in to Liz.
“It’s okay,” he whispered. “Hal’s going to let you go. It’s me he wants.”
Liz whispered back. “You believe him?”
“He won’t hurt you. He’s downloading your consciousness. It’s gonna take two more days. You’ll be free after prom.”
Liz’s brow crinkled in anger.
“What?!” Jay whispered. “You get to return to nice, sane reality. I’m the one stuck in a computer game.”
Liz stalked over the lawn and went into her house, slamming the front door and puncturing the conversation Sheriff Jenkins and Mr. Knight were having.
Mr. Knight stared at the door mournfully, then murmured, “She’s been like this ever since you picked her up.”
In Beta Page 14