“You ought to date Gabrielle, Mr. Dove – you were made for each other.” And now I did cut off our connection. My screen returned to my desk page image, which was a photo of Gabrielle with long black hair. The lighting was low and ambery colored, intimate and warm. It was a close up, so you couldn’t tell that all she had been wearing when I took the picture was the black plastic masquerade mask she wore over her eyes, those eyes staring mysteriously out of the holes.
I went to her apartment that night. Banged on the door. Rang the buzzer. An elderly Choom woman crept around the corner of the hall on all fours, startling me when I looked down at her and saw her advancing on me.
“Looking for my beads,” she croaked. “My necklace broke.”
I sighed, and immediately squatted down to run my hands over the carpeting, which I regretted profoundly when I felt its greasy texture, like the hide of some animal. Rotting animal.
“You looking for the girl in that apartment?” the old woman asked.
“Yes. Gabrielle.”
“She moved out, dear.”
I sat up on my knees. “Moved out? Jesu– when did she move out?”
“A few days ago. Sorry I can’t say where. I never spoke to her. But I saw her carrying out some boxes.”
So. So, that was it then, wasn’t it? And she hadn’t even told me. Perhaps, she had even done it to get away from me. If she had stayed in town I might still never find her; Punktown is a big place. She had disappeared, perhaps like her mother.
Something small rolled under my palm, which I had forgotten was still sweeping. A tiny crystal bead, which I blankly handed over to the old woman. “That’s all I could find,” I droned, and I rose and then took her arm to help her to her feet as well.
“What a dear boy,” she told me. She was as small and thin as the prosty I’d rented several days ago. Someday that young girl would look like this. Transfigured.
I sighed, glanced down the hall, and saw a door hanging open. It was the door that the immense, blue-faced man or woman had lingered in that time, peeking out at me.
Why was the door open that way? I expected to see the huge, balloon-like face float into the opening at any minute.
Instead, I saw the elderly Choom woman shuffle toward the doorway, and begin to pass through it.
I darted down the hall to catch up with her. As I whispered intensely to her, I flicked my eyes repeatedly into the apartment behind her.
“Hey...I’m sorry, but does another person live with you? Very...um, large. No hair? Blue skin...maybe?”
“Blue skin? No, dear, no one like that lives with me. In fact, no one lives with me at all.”
I straightened up slowly. Had I been mistaken, then, about which door this was? I could have sworn that it was the same...
Reluctantly I backed away from it, muttering thanks. She thanked me again, and closed the door between us.
***
GABRIELLE CALLED ME in the small hours of the morning. I had to get up for work in just three hours more, but I scurried bleary-brained to my computer when I heard her voice.
She was on the screen, but the light was dim on her end. Just the glow of her own vidscreen on her face. She looked terrible. Her eyes were not only narrow, as usual, but squinted. Her face was bloated and doughy. And now she had shaved off her eyebrows as well. It was not an appealing development.
“Thank you for putting Mr. Dove in touch with me, Christopher,” she whispered, as if afraid someone else would hear her...someone there with her, “but never, never ever again tell anyone about me. About what I do. About that book I have. You know the one I mean.”
“I’m sorry...it’s just that he said he’d give you a lot of money for it.”
“I didn’t charge him for it. He’s like me. He’s a priest. I’m a priestess...”
“He didn’t pay you? What the hell – Gabe, he told me he paid you! Do you know what he sells the originals of these things for? He could have at least paid you ten thousand munits...a couple thousand...Christ, I’ll give you the rest of what he gave me. He gave me a thousand munits!”
“I don’t want your money. I didn’t want his money...”
“Where are you, Gaby? Why did you move, huh? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Don’t tell anyone about me, Christopher. I’m warning you.”
“Listen...Gaby...I love you. All right? You hear me?”
“Remember Maria. Remember what happened to her. Maria was stupid. Maria talked about these things. Showed them to people. It isn’t smart, Christopher, to talk about these things to just anyone...”
“Gabrielle!”
“I can’t talk to you any more, Christopher...”
“Gabrielle!” I shouted, as if she were falling away from me down a deep, deep well. I wanted to reach into the screen.
The screen went dead.
“Fuck!” I hissed, whirling away from the desk, pacing about the room. My huge VT was dead, too, except for a banner ribbon that never went away, scrolling across the bottom. Right now it asked me to try Phixitol, to combat depression, to alleviate anxiety, to bring calm and balance and make me able to face the day with a smile...
***
“MR. DOVE, DO you happen to know where Gabrielle is living now?”
“No, Mr. Ruby, I’m sorry...I don’t.”
“Are you ever in touch with each other?”
“No, Mr. Ruby, we are not.”
“She says she gave you the disk. For free. That you didn’t pay her for it.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ruby, I have a customer...”
“You lied to me, Mr. Dove.”
“I have to go, sir...”
“You’re making her delusions worse!”
“That’s quite enough, Mr. Ruby.”
“Should I call you Father Dove? She called you a priest. She says she’s a priestess. Do you ever do your cute little rites together? Huh?”
“She told you that? That I’m a priest?”
“Yes, she did...”
“You both talk too much, Mr. Ruby, if I might venture to say so.”
Then my screen went blank. Again.
***
IT WAS MY work computer. My boss walked past my cubicle and glanced in. I considered smiling over at her, decided to ignore her instead and look busy. I quickly opened a call from the customer service queue. “Hi, this is Chris,” I said, “how may I help you today?” I distractedly took in a face on my vidplate; a blocky male face, little features clustered toward its center, a crew cut dyed metallic silver. Some sports star was wearing his hair like that, prompting such imitation, but I took no interest in sports. I took no interest in this man; instead, I found my eyes drifting out my window.
I was quivering very subtly but very consistently, as if an electric current flowed through me. Mr. Dove had been rude to me. In fact, if I wasn’t being too paranoid, I thought maybe his tone, at the end, had been somewhat menacing. It wasn’t like him. Or was it?
Down in the street, I watched a robot hovercleaner move along the gutter. Programmed to follow its maps of the city, never ceasing in its labors as it zapped the litter and garbage it consumed, never stopping to rest. As it turned from Grid Street onto Avenue K, I saw that two little black boys rode on its back bumper.
“Hello?” said the silver-haired young man. “Hey?”
I looked directly at him. “Yes – how can I help you?”
“I have a net page with your service...a game page, where I put a bunch of games I got off the net. And I used the game tools you offer to make a couple of my own games...”
“Yes, that’s fun, isn’t it? Do you need some game-making tips? We have a special crew for that kind of...”
“No...well...I don’t know. My game is acting funny. The one I call Sweet Revenge. It’s a first-person hunt-and-kill, and I track down these girls through Punktown...”
Sounded all too typical to me. I glanced out the window again, without even meaning to. I rubbed at my chin absent-mindedly, and
felt rough stubble there. I had slapped on hair gel hurriedly that morning, running late for work; it had smeared and dried on my upper forehead, which now felt varnished and constricted. I craved another coffee. I vibrated.
“I used my past four girlfriends in the game...I scanned in some photos and vids of them, and made them into the four girls I’m tracking down to kill...”
“Hence Sweet Revenge,” I said, nodding, not looking at him. “And?”
I narrowed my eyes. Every day this same view was presented outside my window, churning with life but unmoving, differing for the most part only in its lighting, in its weather. Because it was so unchanging, I barely dwelt on it consciously, only dreamily. I could really say the same about the city even when I walked its streets, interacted with it. Of course, part of me was always alert and on guard for danger; you had to be. But I didn’t take in the details directly. It was like I saw and experienced most of the city peripherally, subliminally. My focus was narrow. Ant’s eye view, low to the ground. Not even a bird could fly high enough to take in the whole of Punktown.
Maybe that was why I had never noticed the purple building I saw outside my office window now. At least, I had never consciously noticed it. For a moment or two I wondered if it were new, but it didn’t look new, and I couldn’t recall whether I had seen any skeletal framework of a building under construction in the past year or two.
“...I tracked down two of the girls into an alley near Oval Square,” the young man was continuing. “I’d already killed Aymee and Breeze...those were my first two girlfriends in college...”
The purple building was actually more of a pale violet. It was quite tall – though there were certainly far taller buildings in view – and tapered jaggedly toward the top like an old step pyramid. A silvery spire topped it, gleaming in the sun like a thin blade. I thought maybe it was one of those buildings that are grown around a metal framework rather than assembled, because it had a sort of organic look, at least from my position. The purple bricks or tiles that either composed it or at least formed its outer skin looked large and irregular in shape, and I was reminded either of the cracked mud of a desert or the scaly hide of a crocodile.
“Well, I saw Jen and Breeeanna at the end of this alley, and they were sort of hiding around the corner of a big old trash zapper. I started sneaking up on them, but I took my time, because I wanted to scare them. To savor it, you know? Because this would be the end of the game. But I heard them whispering. And they were even giggling...”
“It’s nice, the AI characters you can make for these games,” I muttered.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t like it. They weren’t scared. I thought, do they have guns? Why aren’t they afraid? What are they whispering about?”
“Did your program allow for them to protect themselves, fight back?”
“Sure...I wanted it to be a challenge. Breeze had clawed my face pretty good before I nailed her. But anyway, I moved in carefully with my shotgun ready...”
“Shotgun’s always my favorite gun in a game,” I murmured. I watched a helicar float past the windows of the purple building, reflecting the sun like rows and rows of mirrors.
“Yeah, so I could see them now around the end of that trash zapper...only it wasn’t just Jen and Breeeanna. I saw a third girl with them.”
“Yes? You had programmed the game to have incidental characters, right? Background filler?”
“Yeah, and there were interactive characters too, but this was different, man. I don’t know. This other character was acting like my main characters. She was just more...alive than the background characters. And she was whispering with them. And giggling with them. I knew they were talking about me. And this new girl was scary, man...”
“How’s that?” I asked. I saw clouds reflected in the windows on another face of the purple building. Clouds slowing moving. It made it seem as if you were looking at fog or steam rolling around inside a vast container.
“She was bald, and she...”
I looked into the vidscreen. “Bald?”
“Yeah, and she was fat. Fatter than dung. And her skin was like...”
Blue, I thought. Or did I say it out loud?
“...like a corpse, man. I brought up the shotgun and fired, I was so mad. I hit Jen in the shoulder and she went down, but Breeeanna and the fat girl ducked behind the zapper. I moved in and finished Jen off before she could get up. But she wasn’t screaming, man – she was still laughing at me. Looking up and laughing at me like crazy. I blew her face off, that bitch. She used to laugh at me when I dated her, too...”
“The other two,” I prompted him.
“They were gone. Turns out there was another alley that branched off to the right...I couldn’t see it before because the zapper blocked it. I guess. I could swear there wasn’t another alley there before. Anyway, they got away.”
“Have there been any other unusual or uncharacteristic occurrences in this or any other game?”
“Well...sometimes in Sweet Revenge I hear weird music. Not like a soundtrack, but coming out of windows. Maybe it’s just background detail. Mostly the whole background I got straight off of other game templates. It’s just kind of...weird. I didn’t used to hear it. Oh, and sometimes I get lost in places I know very well...and then when I get back to those places later, they’re normal again. It’s like the game moves the buildings around on me sometimes, or confuses the layout.”
I nodded. I vibrated.
“Um...what did you say your name was?”
“Marrk.”
“Marrk, would you mind giving me your pass code, so I can get into your game-building page and your finished games myself? I’d like to look into this for you.”
“All right. Sure. My password is killallbitches.”
I wondered why my new friend had such poor luck with the ladies. “Thanks, Marrk...I’ll call you back with my findings as soon as I can. You can continue to access your site, but please don’t add to it or alter it in any way until I’ve concluded my diagnosis – all right?”
“Sure, thanks, man.”
A shadow fell over my face and a large dark form lowered into view outside my window. Peripherally I saw an insect-like arm reach toward the pane. I flinched hard and swivelled in my chair to see a hovering robot running a soapy squeegee down the outside of my window. I nodded at its single staring lens, gave it a tattered flicker of a smile. I vibrated.
***
WHILE A QUICK dinner heated up, I punched in the information to access the netlink page for Marrk Argent. I ate the dinner from a tray in my lap as I began his game, Sweet Revenge. It began in his apartment, which was too sumptuous to be based on his actual apartment, and I certainly hoped he didn’t really own that arsenal of guns. I ignored the slithering advances of his two gorgeous roommates (based on popular VT actresses Jessika Heart Thatcher and Angelah Lee Henderson), which I’m sure would link into a sex game (perhaps a VR), and picked out a nice pump-action shotgun and a handgun from his vast collection to bring with me. Then I hit the streets. It was raining and night time. Irritated at the poor visibility, I had to go back to START and figure out how to make it sunny and day. Then I hit the streets.
To check out Argent’s comments on how familiar surroundings had seemed to become confused, I headed for the nearest location that I myself would be familiar with – my workplace. I rode a tube and got there within several minutes (the game was totally real time). I found the outside of my workplace without any confusion, but the game wouldn’t allow me to enter the building itself. I cranked back my virtual neck so as to stare up, up at my high window, as if I thought I might see my own face looking out of it, looking down at myself.
As I started away to take a tube to my apartment, the next location I intended to experiment with, a thought leaped to the front of my skull and I whipped around to examine the skyline as seen between the towers looming before me.
Yes – there it was, seen in the distance between my office building and its neighbor. The pa
le purple building with its gleaming spire and its pebbly scaly skin. Somehow, seeing it in this game seemed to reassure me of its existence more than gazing at it out of my office window had, earlier that day.
I rode the tube home like I would after any working day, except for the shotgun I carried (not that I hadn’t felt like bringing a shotgun to work a few times). A Tikkihotto woman on the tube stood beside me holding the overhead bar, so that I caught myself peeking at her bared underarm. As if I needed to steal peeks at a computer construct. She was short and cute with her pale skin and plump curvy shape and little black dress, and I liked the fluorescent lime green dye to her bobbed hair, but I could never get past those swimming clear tendrils they have instead of eyes. They wavered at me like plants underwater.
“What’s that for?” she asked me, staring at my shotgun.
“Do you want to fuck?” I spoke out loud to the screen.
“No thank you,” she said.
“Can I shoot you?”
“Please don’t. You would get in trouble,” she said calmly.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“What’s that for?” she asked, writhing sea anemone eyes directed toward my shotgun.
I disembarked at my regular stop, and again found my way across familiar sidewalks, up to my apartment building, without anything out of the ordinary. Maybe there was less graffiti on the Art Deco-like angels that flanked the front steps, abstracted and skinny and tall, holding swords in front of their nude androgynous bodies. There’d been more graffiti added since this scene had been recorded for use in such games. I wondered just how much of Punktown was available for exploration in this game. Well, it wouldn’t let me inside my apartment building, so I couldn’t find out if I were home.
So...what next? Should I start using his portable tracker to begin hunting down – what was the surviving girlfriend’s name? – Breeeanna? Breeeanna and the fat bald woman who looked like a “corpse”?
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