by Rae Mariz
But I wasn’t sure. There was something raw and clumsy about the spectacle that corporations just didn’t know how to imitate.
I guess I wanted to know what they were selling as much as everyone else…but I also wanted to know who they were.
Ari was hunched over her intouch®. Her rapid thumb movements pounded out a text message, probably to one of the Craftsters. She snorted back laughter, then pressed Send.
My intouch® buzzed when she uploaded since I was subscribed to her stream. She had written:
aria: i think i know who took your dress form @ROCKET
“You think that’s Rocket’s dress form?” I asked, taking a closer look at the lifeless body.
Ari looked up. “What? No.” She glanced again at the dummy corpse. “No way. That’s not even close to her measurements. All the Craftsters made mannequins with our individual body shapes, and someone took Rocket’s last week from her work station. I bet Quelly took it.”
Ari went on to explain some ongoing Sweatshop drama. I was disappointed that she thought a misplaced mannequin was a more interesting whodunit than a body dropped from the fifth floor.
“Besides,” Ari said, “you shouldn’t comment on people’s private conversations, Kid. It’s rude.”
“Right. Sorry,” I mumbled.
“And it just leads to misunderstandings, which can cause emotional trauma, and result in mental anguish…” Her voice trailed off as she checked her intouch®. I didn’t know what Rocket replied since I wasn’t on her stream, but Ari said, “Hey, I need to go up to four. You coming?”
“No,” I said, still looking at the dummy corpse. “No, I have a meeting with Winterson. But you’re coming to the Studio later, right?”
Ari did that thing she does when she’s kind of annoyed. She shakes the hair out her eyes really fast, sighs dramatically, and does a kind of half-shrug, sending her bracelets hula-hooping into irritated little orbits around her wrists.
“I guess.”
I took one last look at the body. At the shape of the splatter mark, kind of bird-wing shaped. Then I started walking to the other side of the first floor, to Carol Winterson’s office.
I felt ridiculously sorry for it, the dummy. That no one cared that it ended its life for some unknowable reason, and now it was just lying there waiting for the cleanup crew to mop up its goo. Then I had to remind myself that it was fake. Not real.
Carol Winterson was my advisor. She was forty-mumble years old, but kind of new to the Game. I heard she had worked as a teacher in one of the last unaffiliated schools, but took the position because she wanted to be where the students needed her most. Which didn’t make any sense. The Game gave us everything we wanted. It was designed to do that.
The Game started when the government admitted they had zero funding for education and the sponsors swooped in to invest in “the future.” They set up Game locations all over the nation, like chain stores, to guarantee that the quality of education would be consistent at all sites. This new system was good for the government, good for the economy, good for the students. A win-win-win situation, as they said in the marketing literature.
“Katey. Come in, have a seat. I’ll be with you in a sec.”
Winterson had the phone cradled between her shoulder and ear while she was trying to type something. The sponsors didn’t bother hooking up the counselors and educators with their latest tech swag. They saved all the best toys for the kids.
I rubbed my thumb against my intouch®, felt it purring in my pocket with news. I ached to pick it up and check the updates, but Winterson asked students to keep them off in her office.
I watched her fumble around with her ghetto technology, gray strands streaking through her frizzy dark hair like rocket trails in the night sky. She was clueless, but it could’ve been worse. I could’ve been stuck with someone semisavvy. One of those advisors who weren’t much more than failed cool hunters, roaming around the school with their hip hairstyles that were grab like maybe six months ago. Someone like Ari’s advisor, Jaye, who was more interested in hearing about self-esteem issues and asking leading questions on how we felt about the sponsors and school policies than providing educational guidance.
I tried to listen in on Winterson’s phone conversation. Whoever she was talking to, it sounded like they were talking about me. Or I could just be a paranoid egomaniac, I don’t know. But the talk was overly cryptic, a lot of mmhmms and glancing my way. The shadows in the corners of her mouth meant Winterson was pissed and bad at hiding it. She hung up, painfully civilized.
“Sorry about that, Katey. Let’s see now.” She squinted at her screen. “How’s things?”
“Fine, I guess.”
I dug around in the bowl of corporate candies Winterson kept on her desk, trying to find something not gross. She turned slightly and peered over her shoulder at the surveillance camera behind her before focusing on the screen again.
“Your scores are looking good,” she said. “You’re riding high on the bell curve.”
“Yay. I’m average,” I said, waving a cherry-flavored lollipop in sarcastic celebration.
Winterson’s lips tightened into a sympathetic smile.
I looked down and wrestled with the candy wrapper. No matter how much time I dedicated to playing the Game, it didn’t feel like I was the kind of person who was ever going to get high scores.
“I see you got bonus points for speed on six of your last ten PLAY missions,” she said. I know she was trying to be encouraging, but it made me feel like a bigger loser.
“Yeah, I’ve been trying to solve the clues fast to get the time bonus. To save up score credit for completion prizes or whatever.”
“Is there a particular prize you have your eye on?”
The sponsors donated products to an end-of-year auction where the players with the highest scores could cash in their points for prizes after they completed their seventeenth and final level of the Game. I was still only on Level 15, but all the scores add up, so if I kept performing at this degree of dazzling mediocrity I would probably be able to afford like a “thanks for playing” button or something.
“My mom is hoping I can get enough points for the free ride scholarship.” It was a bundled package with prizes from restaurant and real-estate sponsors for everything I’d need for living a whole year in the city after I left the Game. “But I’d really like recording and mixing gear for a home studio. Not that I’ll ever have the score for any of that, but…”
Winterson nodded and made a note in her computer.
“I see you’ve made some changes to your profile.”
“Yeah, you noticed?”
“It’s been flagged as ‘insufficient use of Network page’ by the administrators.”
I almost choked on the fruity juices of the lollipop. “What? I’m not blowing off my content assignments. I uploaded some songs Mikey and I wrote a few weeks ago, and I just did that essay-review for media literacy score.”
“I know. Your Game content is fine, but they’re concerned about the status of your Network page. Here, under the About Me section, you wrote ‘None of the above.’”
I felt strangely embarrassed. I mean, I knew administrators monitored our pages—it was where we uploaded all our content assignments to be evaluated for score—but I didn’t think they would make a big deal about what I wrote in the About Me section. I knew other kids who’d written much worse.
“So?” I would’ve left it blank if I could. I couldn’t think of anything clever to put there, didn’t really know how to describe myself to potential viewers of my profile. “Aren’t we allowed to edit our pages?”
“It was such a dramatic change though,” she noted. “It alerted the administrators that there might be an issue you wished to discuss with me. A lot of identifying content had been removed. Have you recently had a falling-out with a friend?”
Our Network profile pages were created when our parents registered us for the Game. They supplied all the facts and deta
ils during sign-up, but we were supposed to be free to mod our layouts to express our aesthetics. I had never really been into code accessories so I’d always let Ari design my page.
She made the background photo collages of the two of us together, and maybe a lyric we’d written or something. It was sweet. But lately I noticed she had been putting things on my page that seemed more like she was describing the person she wished I was instead of who I was. So I tried to do it myself, and apparently failed at that, too.
Winterson struggled to swivel her screen toward me to show me my Network page. I barely glanced at it; I knew what it looked like.
Compared to the tricked-out layouts and designs of other kids’ pages, it was pretty pathetic.
“Your stated interests are: ‘friends, music, and mysteries,’” she read from the screen.
“Yeah, so? That’s all true.”
“I know, Katey, but don’t you think you could be a little more specific? Even your friend list is much less defined than a girl of your social capabilities should be. Why don’t you share more of your interests and activities? People want to get to know you.”
I made some noncommittal noises. I didn’t really know why, but it felt too complicated to make public things that were important to me. Or maybe I was just frustrated because it felt like I couldn’t express what was important to me even when I really tried.
“The administrators are worried about your failure to engage.”
Failure. It was official. I was a loser. It practically said so in my record. I played with the scrap of latex I’d picked up at the crime scene so I wouldn’t have to look at Winterson’s concerned expression. The face drawn on the balloon piece looked the way I felt. Like this:
“Why do they care?” I said, stretching the rubber until it snapped back on my fingers. “Ow.”
Winterson cleared her throat, then said, “The administrators need to have more insight into your interests to better tailor the Game to your needs.”
She said the words as if she were reading them from a teleprompter, overarticulating each syllable.
“Are you upselling?”
Winterson’s laugh sounded almost bitter. “This is your education, not fries and a Poke® cola.”
I just sat there staring at the inscrutable balloon face.
“Katey?” Winterson said.
“Yeah?” I looked at her. The speckled iris of her eye. The wrinkle at the corner of her mouth. The stripes of her shirt. Her chewed pinky nail.
“Is something wrong?”
“What? No, it’s just…” It wasn’t my fault that I couldn’t articulate my feelings with a cleverly designed app, or that when I added up points on personality quizzes I didn’t recognize the person they described me to be. It’s not like I liked being this average, this unremarkable. I blurted out, “You don’t think the sponsors would ever try to sell suicide or something, do you?”
“What?” she looked genuinely surprised, and maybe a little scared. “You’re not, um, in the market for a product like that, are you?”
Oh Google, she thought I was suicidal. “No, no no,” I assured her and told her about the dummy suicide in the Pit.
She watched me carefully, then said she hadn’t heard anything about it. “I don’t agree with the sponsors on a lot of things, but I doubt they would ever advocate the sale of suicide to kids.”
Her assurances were disturbingly unconvincing, though. I think it was because Winterson herself was disturbingly unconvinced.
3 TRICKSTER
I left the meeting with Winterson kind of weirded out. I couldn’t decide what was worse, that the dummy drop was something the sponsors might have organized, or that it was some completely random person’s idea of a good time.
I glanced at the wide, gray double doors that led to the headquarters, where the school administrators had their offices. The people working back there never came out into the Game, and kids never went in there unless they were sick or in trouble. Mikey had been in a few times for some stupid stuff. He just got too rowdy sometimes.
I stopped by the Pit again. Everything looked so different. I half expected to see a chalk outline, or yellow DO NOT CROSS tape. OK, I knew they didn’t call the cops for dummy suicides. Protecht security, maybe.
But still.
The goop was gone, no signs of the PR prank. I looked up at the railings on the fifth floor, where I had seen the struggle—at least two people messing around by the railing. Even that looked different. The sun had come out, and the blue sky made everything seem impossible.
I’d been thinking of the whole thing as a suicide because of the note on the back: UNIDENTIFIED. CHOOSE YOUR SUICIDE. But it wasn’t a fake suicide. Someone up there pushed the body over. It was more like a mock homicide.
Sick.
I checked my intouch® for updates I missed and to see if anyone was commenting on the PR prank.
#spons: swiftx has high score on buy sell & destroy. beat him in the arcade.
mikes: is going to smash this 360flip. doubters, get fuct.
#spons: new release screening on PRESENT screen in 7_mins.
toy321: ATTENTION! ATTENTION! admin plans to ban my flipstream goggles. no reason given.
aria: wants opinions: lilac or sea foam?
No word about the dummy suicide. I couldn’t believe Tesla was starting to get legal hassles for her latest invention, but that was kind of why I subscribed to her stream. Her drama was always the realest.
Mikey was in the Park. I continued past the Pit and thumbed in my update.
kidzero: is not living up to her potential.
I laughed, even though Mikey was probably the only one who would get my joke. I wrote to him.
kidzero: did you sign us up for studio time? @MIKEY
A minute later, he buzzed.
mikes: oops. @KID
mikes: got a frustration-high in the Park @KID
I sighed and replied.
kidzero: is coming to intervene @MIKEY
The Park was a giant playground for adrenaline junkies, and Mikey definitely had a problem. Actually, it was a problem everyone in the Game had to some degree. The designers of the Game had manufactured just the right conditions to create maximum motivation in players. They programmed the system so that each of its learning tasks engaged our present level of abilities and developed new skills in the process that were needed to take on the challenge of the next task. Always managing to hit that sweet spot between boredom and frustration to keep the obsessive freak in all of us coming back for more. There were times I’d just get lost in a mission, spending hours playing it again and again and not even realize how much progress I had made.
Yeah, it was addictive. But sweet Google, it was FUN.
The Park was located in the far corner of the first floor. It looked as if the dead department store had been possessed by a carnival, and risen up to claim the bodies of restless souls who wanted to see if they could die twice.
There was a climbing wall with varying levels of difficulty, giant trampolines, a bike racetrack, bungee Velcro walls, and a million other fun-filled ways to break your bones.
Mikey was one of the chaos of kids popping tricks off the ramps, weaving along the concrete curves of the skate park. The clatter of lost boards, the cheers and hollers of kids nailing their tricks all echoed in the space. I leaned against a wall and watched Mikey attempt his trick for the forty-seventh time.
He failed spectacularly.
I cheered him on from behind the railing, not like a supersized jerk. For real. I knew he would get it…eventually.
“I almost got it,” he called back at me, rubbing his wrist and kicking off again.
Mikey had a high tolerance for frustration. Some people would think it was unwise or insane to keep banging one’s head against the same wall again and again, but I thought it was admirable. Talent or skill wasn’t how you recognized a genius. A genius was the person giving the world the eff-you salute while doing the impossible. Mikey
’s scores were low, but, technically, he was probably the best player in the Game. No one could beat his raw determination.
But still. I couldn’t just stand there and watch him wound himself. I absentmindedly started messing around with the piece of balloon again, wondering how I could find out more about what that stunt was all about. I amused myself by pulling and stretching it out, changing the expression of the ink lines with a tug here or there.
I worked out a way to fasten the balloon scrap to my wristband, honoring the dead dummy with a kind of mourning band. We will not forget.
Mikey was still trying and failing, so I turned to check out what else was happening in the Park. It was the usual anthill insanity of kids waiting restlessly in lines to get on rides or play the most physical of sports. The scoreboard showed the “Times to Beat” for the bike races and lap swimming and waterslide.
I found myself watching one guy make his way through the crowd. The crowd itself seemed to notice him too. People quit shoving and turned to watch when he passed. He was saying something to each of them, whispering to kids waiting in line to get on the trampoline or get a spot on the SlingShot. I wondered what he’d told them, because it left them staring after him. Maybe that’s what I noticed, not the guy himself, but the reaction in the people around him.
He must be branded. I’d never seen him before, but cool hunters should have been all over him with his ability to shift a crowd like that.
He wasn’t particularly attractive, or at least not my type. He had a genuine dread mullet—as opposed to the more common ironic dread mullet—and pretty mean-looking muscles. His cheekbones and the straight line of his nose led my eyes directly to his and trapped them there.
There was something about him. I couldn’t figure it out.
As he came closer, I heard what he was telling people: “You’re in…you’re out…no, sorry…cut, uh-uh…out.”