Ready Player Fun

by A V Kern

  A woman who looked remarkably like a Dark Queen herself appeared before me, leaning against the console with a wry smile! She had long, luxurious black hair, thigh-high boots, a shiny one-piece, and an excessively over-the-top villain cape (in blue instead of red). I still had the dildo buzzing away between my legs, barely holding myself back from a mind-melting release that had built and built, and when she walked up to me and laid a sensual, luxurious kiss on my lips, pressing her hot, incredibly busty chest against my own sensitive nipples, I couldn’t take it anymore. I came with a screaming orgasm, writhing against the Queen in front of the Battletoads console, my mind exploding with ecstatic fireworks. My legs shook so hard it was like I was sitting on top of a broken washing machine, and when I was done the Queen drew the vibrator out from between my legs and kissed it. I expected it to turn into the Ruby Dildo as I leaned there panting against the cool wood and plastic, but instead, it transformed into a steel chastity belt, just like the one Maid Marian wears in Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

  “What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?” I demanded as I accepted it with a limp, shaky hand.

  The Queen just shrugged, smiled at me, and disappeared into a cosmic black whirlwind. What a letdown.

  Ap0ll0 wasn’t anywhere to be seen, either, which meant I hadn’t been on the right track after all.

  Suddenly, the Grand Fuckatorium scoreboard flashed overhead once more:

  — 1st Place: Ap0ll0

  — 2nd Place: Felicia McFly

  I gasped again! Ap0ll0 had found the Ruby Dildo while I dallied with Battletoads and was now beating me on the official scoreboard. How had he done it? What had he uncovered?

  I buzzed him on the commlink again and again, but he didn’t answer. I’d just have to track him down the old-fashioned way. Sighing, I tucked the chastity belt into my inventory and trudged out of the Valley of Veedeeohohohgaymz, trying to figure out where else he might have wandered off to on this stupid planet.

  Chapter 4

  Roger Dodger and his cultists hadn’t stood idly by while we cunters searched for the Ruby Dildo, of course. Our friends had all appeared on the scoreboard beneath me and Ap0ll0 now, and beneath them the remaining slots filled up rapidly with notorious FU Troopers and of course my rival, LisaFrank90210. I’d have to hurry. If Roger Dodger’s troops scored the Ruby Dildo before I did, I’d never be able to live it down. I sat down among the baby grues and thought hard: If I was Bartleby Shaw, where on Planet Zork-Reference would I hide a Ruby Dildo? What references would an incredibly nerdy sexual deviant use to conceal such a thing?

  I’d casually studied enough pop culture history even outside of the 80s—because Bowie Jackson prepares obsessively and excessively—to have plenty of leads, but which of them would Shaw have used? Pokemon Ruby didn’t come out until 2002, far too late, and Dorothy’s ruby slippers in the Wizard of Oz were far too early for 1980s nerd culture to absorb. There was a V.C. Andrews novel called Ruby from the mid-90s, but that was the wrong fandom entirely… was it possible that Shaw had made a reference that didn’t come directly from the nostalgia-laden rose-colored memories of his childhood? Everything I knew about the man suggested that that was preposterous! Shaw had a very tight 15-year window for his gaming and sexual obsessions that had baked his brain into the type of excessively frothy lifelong fanboi that would build a virtual world like this, and it didn’t seem likely that he’d deviate from his narrow band of weird and specific pop culture interests even just this once.

  But then it hit me! His media interests might be narrow, but before creating the O-Face Shaw had been a lifelong software developer. He’d spent the early part of his career as a programmer for Google, before Google became Googlezon, and had programmed in a variety of languages professionally in the early 20-oughts, one of them being the ancient Ruby language that had been conceived in 1993 in Japan. Most people today have forgotten early programming frameworks as surely as any other cultural phenomenon which fades with time, but as an avid student of Shaw’s whack-o journals, I was familiar with lots of esoteric trivia that no other sane person would bother knowing.

  What had been one of the most popular frameworks for web development in the mid-2000s, during the early portion of Shaw’s programming career?

  I stared up overhead at the great, planet-circling train of GUE that carried travelers to and from planet Zork-Reference. The answer had been right in front of me all along. To find the Ruby Dildo, I need look no further than atop the Rails which stretched above me. Instantly I fired off my rocket blasters and soared into the air, catching the GUE train as it rocketed past me, and lowered myself into the main train car. On the ride here, I’d been lost in thought, supposing that the train was just another stupid affectation of the many weird nods to rando pop culture that Shaw had inserted into his personal playground—I’d been more right than I realized, completely missing the fact that Shaw had done huge amounts of his professional work in Ruby on Rails. But now I took a serious look around. There were several passenger cars filled with bored NPCs—no players traveled to Planet Zork-Reference because nobody actually cared about references to a 70 year-old text-based adventure game—but the back train car was locked tight and sealed by a enormous door with a tiny hole in the center. I peered more closely at the hole and realized it resembled an anus. A bronze anus.

  I pulled the Bronze Dildo out of my inventory and poked it experimentally toward the hole. “Ow ow ow!” a high pitched voice shrieked, and I yanked it back, looking around. But when nothing else presented itself, I shoved the dildo toward the hole again, more forcefully this time. Once again, I heard the “Ow ow ow!” sound, but I didn’t let it dissuade me. I shoved the Bronze Dildo deep into the anus until the “Ow ow ow!” subsided, replaced by a soothing “OHHHhhhhhahhhh…” and then the door twisted open from the anus, rotating like a circular port door in a scifi videogame. I tucked the Bronze Dildo back into my inventory and strode confidently inside the unlocked room.

  It was shocking to go from puns about programming back to stupid pop culture references, and yet here we were: A perfect recreation of the tri-screen setup in 1983’s WarGames where David Lightman has to use the epic hacking skills of a high school student plus basic logic to outwit a computer programmed by the U.S. Military. A blinking tic-tac-toe grid awaited me, and a penis-shaped joystick stood on a pedestal in the middle of the room, a strange deviation from the original setup. I stepped up to it warily, wondering what the trick was. I’d watched the movie a dozen times—as a nerdy programmer from the 80s, it was one of Shaw’s favorites, and he claimed the only thing that would have made it better was if they’d added a minotaur sex scene or two. There was nothing else in the room except a stool and a wastebasket.

  “All right, WOPR,” I said, addressing the game by the name given to it in the movie. “Show me what you got.”

  I quickly made my tic-tac-toe selections, maneuvering the penis joystick into position and gently grazing the tip with my thumb to lay down X’s in response to the game’s O’s, but ended in a predictable stalemate. That was to be expected, since it was the point of the movie, so there had to be another puzzle to solve that went one layer deeper. I tried purposely losing the game of tic-tac-toe and asking the computer for different games, both with no effect, but then I thought harder about the moral of the movie. It came to me quickly.

  “The only way to win,” I murmured. “Is not to play.” I carried the penis joystick over to the wastebasket and dumped it inside. Instantly, the screen changed to display a blinking message: “How about a nice game of chess, Felicia?”

  Now I was getting somewhere! Shaw had been a chess master, and of course I’d studied chess too in order to teach myself strategy, so I quickly played against the computer, moving my pieces via touchscreen, and beat it handily. As I forced WOPR’s king into a checkmate, another fanfare of trumpets sounded, and once again Captain Minosexaur appeared before me.

  “Captain Minosexaur!” I exclaimed. “That last puzzle was ex
cessively obscure and stupid.”

  “Aren’t all of them?” he asked gravely. “It only gets dumber from here.”

  “I don’t see how that could be possible.”

  “Oh ho ho. Just you wait, you little minx.”

  I blushed, wondering what he meant by that. “Captain Minosexaur! Are you coming onto me?”

  “Not at all, my dear. I fuck exclusively minotaurs.”

  “What about that Baroness who gave you crabs?” I pointed out.

  “There’s a reason I only fuck mythological creatures, now.”

  “Well hand me the Ruby Dildo and let me get going on the third one, then,” I snapped, annoyed that he’d rebuffed me. Felicia McFly didn’t get turned down. My avatar was far too hot for that, and I wasn’t used to rejection.

  “Not so fast! You have not yet completed the challenge for the Ruby Dildo.”

  “Huh? I solved the stupid WarGames puzzle.”

  “That was but the gate. Now, meet your foes. Defeat the inferior framework in order to receive your dildo!”

  I sighed. Nothing could ever just be easy, could it?

  Captain Minosexaur gestured toward the back of the traincar where WOPR’s three computer screens folded away to reveal a hidden compartment, and I suddenly faced two new foes: A huge snake that looked remarkably like Kaa from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book—and definitely not the Disney version—curled around itself on the floor beside a black-skinned gunslinging cowboy wrapped in metal chains. He suddenly stood up, bursting through his chains, and drew both of his pistols with a roar.

  I gasped, taking in the scene before me in the context of Shaw’s programming preferences. “Captain Minosexaur! You didn’t… really? A pair of dumb pop culture references that’re also programming puns?”

  But he had done exactly that: Python and Django. My enemies were a callback to a popular web framework from the early 2000s which Shaw had hated. I sighed and did a backflip, dodging Django’s bullets, while pointedly avoiding looking at the python’s hypnotizing gaze and transformed my arm into my rock-busting arm cannon. As I landed in a dramatic crouch, boobs bouncing in my space suit, a breeze passed through the traincar and gently ruffled my long, curling hair, giving me just the right amount of heroic pizazz. Then I launched myself into action, using my faster-than-light avoidance system to twist between several more of the cowboy’s bullets while blasting Kaa full in the face with my arm cannon in an explosion of blue energy. His head crisped away to ashes, and the remainder of the python’s sinewy body thumped to the ground. Having dispatched one threat, I now whirled on Django.

  The dark-skinned cowboy circled my fair-skinned avatar, six-guns waving unpredictably as he tried to find an opening that my anti-projectile systems wouldn’t allow me to dodge. But I didn’t want to give him time to think about the fight. In a sudden surprise attack I leapt forward and knocked his legs out from under him with a Mortal Kombat-style foot sweep while stammering hasty apologies for the politically charged and problematic nature of the racial overtones of our battle. Social media, even in 2054, had programmed me to make the analysis unavoidable no matter how I felt about it.

  “Tarantino’s movie and your namesake was itself so much worse than this brief fight!” I cried defensively, racked by my conflicted guilt, as Django ducked under my energy blast and lashed out with a savage kick that knocked me back through the train car’s window and sent me tumbling through the open skies of Planet Zork-Reference in a glittering shower of sparkling glass that would have meant certain death for anyone not wearing rocket boots. Fortunately, I was, and I activated them to maneuver myself back on top of the train, where Django was climbing onto the roof of the car so that we could have the only type of final showdown scene that’s possible when you Chekhov’s Gun a railroad-themed fight.

  “Maybe so, but you still have to admit that this fight will be extremely offensive to some people just by existing!” he insisted as he squeezed off another three bullets at me in such a way that it was physically impossible for me to twist out of the way of all of them. “The fact that one work of media is more offensive than another doesn’t make the first any less offensive on its own merit.”

  I caught one bullet in the shoulder while dodging the other two and winced as my exo-suit contracted painfully, considering Django’s analysis of our situation. Was he being genuine, or trying to use culture war techniques to get an advantage on me here? I couldn’t afford the distraction in either case… I needed to beat him to get the Ruby Dildo and save the O-Face! I leapt across the traincar and smashed him in the teeth, bloodying his mouth with a suit-enhanced super-strength punch that knocked him flat onto his back, while responding to his wild accusations.

  “Can’t I just fight you as the character you are, who is literally trying to kill me, I might add?” I asked in between punches. “Without considering the larger context of our battle through the lens of historical racial injustices?” I picked him up by his shirt and punched him square in the face twice more. “And I feel pressured to add in advance that beating you like this is in no way meant to symbolically diminish the plight or reduce the seriousness of an economic, legal, and social system that kept economically disadvantaged populations and primarily people of color locked into the socioeconomic rung that they found themselves in during the early part of the 21st century.”

  “You’re not beating me!” Django roared, ignoring the dizzying and masterful display of thoughtful political correctness I’d presented him with. He scissor-snapped his legs and knocked mine out from under me, and now it was he who had me held down on the whizzing traincar. “And I find it even more offensive that you thought we were talking about racism! I was talking about the fact that people who think Django is superior to Ruby on Rails will be really offended that you need to beat me in order to progress in Captain Minosexaur’s stupid game. This is a work of satire, man, and it’s supposed to be about sex! Why are you breaking the fourth wall and getting all political? How dumb are you? It’s like you want to piss off everyone on the internet all at once!”

  He punched me across the face a few times and blood welled up in my mouth. I growled and head-butted him, and then I climbed to my feet as he staggered back, shaking off my blow. “Don’t pretend you weren’t thinking about it too!” I protested. “Everyone was! It’s disingenuous to suggest that we shouldn’t address it at all!”

  “They are now! You’re awfully defensive about this whole racism thing considering I never even brought it up,” he shouted, racing back toward me with his fists raised.

  “Are you sure you’re thinking about this right?” I protested, activating my boot rockets to launch into his charge with extra force. “Have you even considered looking at this through a lens of sexism? My avatar is a woman, and you’re standing on a train beating the shit out of me! That’s highly problematic too.”

  Django and I slammed into each other, both bleeding, neither one of us giving ground as we locked arms and struggled, our faces contorted into masks of fury.

  “You’re… not really… a woman,” he growled through gritted teeth.

  “You… can’t… know that…” I replied. “…and you’re… an AI!”

  “It doesn’t have to be either or!” he insisted, flinging me suddenly into the air. I steadied myself with rocket boots and zoomed back down to crash into him once again.

  “You mean we can both be terrible people who can’t win?” I asked.

  “I’m going to win,” he replied, straining against my exo-suit’s massive strength.

  “You can’t!” I protested, straining equally against him in an endurance-sapping stalemate. “The plot won’t allow it!”

  Then my eyes widened in surprise as I realized what the whole challenge had been about, if only I was wise enough to understand. Bartleby Shaw wasn’t trying to make a statement about superiority at all. The challenge was in understanding that!

  “Django,” I cried. “Don’t you see? The only way to win…”

&nbs
p; “What? What is it?”

  “Is not to play!” I shouted. We suddenly stopped fighting and stood awkwardly atop the train car, wind whistling around us, as we realized the futility of our battle.

  Then he ripped off his shirt and kissed me, powerful arms wrapping around my body and caressing my skin as my exo-suit’s sex sensors peeled back the protective coating of my armor to allow access to all my avatar’s naughtiest bits.

  “Oh Django, Django!” I cried as he kissed me. “This is differently problematic, but—”

  He laid a finger over my lips and hushed me. “Shut up and let me fuck you, you sweet, stupid sex princess.”

  At first I was reluctant, but I soon yielded to his expert manipulation of the feminine form, my eyes shining with implied consent. His dancing fingers quickly stole any hint of words off my lips, replacing them with the sweet sighing moans of a rapidly mounting tower of arousal that built to the heavens before crashing down over my body, and as he slipped inside of me, probing my secret depths, the ecstasy doubled and redoubled. Django and I came together, letting our epic lovemaking heal the wounds of the battle that had raged between us.

  Soon we finished. As I panted, sweaty, naked, and satisfied in Django’s muscular arms on top of the moving traincar, Captain Minosexaur appeared before us and spread his hands wide.

  “Congratulations, Felicia McFly! You have solved the second puzzle by discovering that love heals all divides and that sometimes abstaining is the only way to win a fight. You have now earned the Ruby Dildo, and I wish you well by it.”

  He handed a sparkling ruby dildo to me with much ceremonial grandeur, and I accepted it without leaving Django’s strong, sexy embrace.

  “Wait,” I said suddenly. “Does that mean that Ap0ll0 did all this too? Did he also…”