Ready Player Fun

by A V Kern

  This was it. Roger Dodger had given me the chance of a lifetime, entirely by accident. All I had to do was not fuck this up, and the O-Face was mine. I took a deep breath and stepped through the gate. A cool sliver of light shimmered through my body, emptying me of the ghostly dildo energy, and suddenly I stood on a flat, empty plain with a dark sky roiling above me. I knew, deep in my heart, that I’d only have one shot to get this right.

  “Come on, Bowie,” I muttered. “You’re Felicia fuckin’ McFly, and you’ve trained your whole life for this moment. If anyone can do this, it’s you.”

  Captain Minosexaur suddenly appeared before me on the plain, in all his glory, but then he shimmered, and took on a shape of much smaller stature. A simple man, a simple geek. A weirdo among weirdos, just like me.

  “Bartleby Shaw?” I asked hesitantly.

  “Indeed, young Felicia,” he replied. “Congratulations. You have come far indeed, to breach the final gate and take my final test.”

  “I don’t understand… aren’t you dead? You seem so dynamic… so alive…”

  “All that I am, and all that I was, lives on here in the O-Face. But it’s time for me to pass my torch on to a new leader—a living leader. And I shall retire to Atlantis, to be forever with my minotaur. Only one challenge remains.”

  “I’m ready, Bartleby. I’m ready to do whatever I must. You were always my hero, you know. Fucking minotaurs, vibrating cock rings in arcades, lewd, weird puzzles… because you didn’t put up some phony shit wall of fakeness to accommodate people’s expectations of you. You just said, ‘Here I am world. Bartleby Shaw, at your service. Fuck me? Fuck you. Fuck all of you!’ I’m the man I am today because of you.”

  “But you’re a woman, my dear!” he protested.

  “Oh, no. This is just my avatar. I’m a straight dude. Look, it’s a long, complicated story involving byzantine laws made by a chief fuckhead among fuckheads. Can we just get on with the challenge?”

  “Of course. Yes. Behold!”

  He waved his hand and revealed a 1980s-era Nintendo Entertainment System hooked up to an ancient television set. On the TV blinked the title screen for 1986’s Metroid, a game, like all games from the 80s, with which I was intimately familiar.

  “Play the game properly to receive your reward,” Shaw said, gesturing toward the squarish controller.

  I stepped up to the console and pressed start. This would be a walk in the park. I knew from memory that the fastest All-Boss clear for Metroid on NES was a bit under 15 minutes. I wasn’t that good, having had to spread myself thin learning to speed-run every game in existence just in case I’d ever have to do it for a stupid challenge, but my average time was still very respectable at just under 18 minutes. I wasn’t kidding when I said I was pretty good at this whole gaming thing.

  We stood in silence for 16 minutes as I blazed through the game, racing toward the credits with gleeful confidence, knowing that I was guaranteed to satisfy Shaw’s request and obtain the best of the five Metroid endings, where Samus Aran would be standing against a starlit sky wearing nothing but a bright pink bikini and boots. I couldn’t lose. I’d done this hundreds of times. But as I zoned out and allowed my brain to auto-pilot my way toward the final fight with Mother Brain, something nagged at me. I hovered uncertainly just outside her room, chewing my lip and looking from the screen to Shaw and back to the screen again.

  There was probably no one alive who knew Shaw better than I did, and something felt wrong about this. Anyone could beat Metroid quickly and see Samus in a sexy bikini costume. There was nothing special about it. Nothing Shaw-specific. He’d never been much of a fan of Metroid, never had more than a passing interest in the game. I was suddenly less sure of myself. Was I really doing the challenge right?

  I squinted at Shaw. “Your whole life…” I murmured. “Your whole life, you were weird as fuck. Most people… most people move through life putting up walls between themselves and others. Hiding their weirdness. Constructing a shiny, manufactured persona to protect themselves from the judgment of people around them. But you didn’t care. You were proud to be you, exactly as you were, and proud of anyone who wasn’t afraid to be themselves either. You fucked minotaurs and left detailed journals about it as your legacy. You created the O-Face in all its raunchy glory. You made the most ridiculous contest in history, just because you could…” My eyes shined as I set the controller on the ground and walked toward the ancient game console.

  I thought of W33b, proudly embracing an aesthetic he loved despite how stupid and cringey other people thought it was for him to do it. I thought of the real girl behind Ap0ll0, setting out to fuck a bunch of chicks in VR-space just because she felt like she had something to prove and wasn’t about to let anyone stop her. I thought of Brony Pastures and Yiff Canyon and Big Baby nursery and BBW-land and all the other frequently-mocked corners of the O-Face that gave people a shimmering slice of happiness in a stupid, fucked-up world, and let them enjoy whatever the fuck they wanted to enjoy without passing judgment on them. I thought of Bartleby Shaw’s life, in all its defiant, minotaur-fucking, vibrating cock-ring wearing, weirdo perverted glory. That was what the O-Face was all about. Laying yourself bare; admitting that this shit was fun, and that everyone had their own fucked-up stuff they were into.

  “Oh…” I breathed, as I glanced up at Shaw in sudden understanding. “The armor. The stuff you hold up to keep yourself away from people who might hurt you. You never wore any. You didn’t see any use for that type of armor in your life, did you, Bartleby? You presented yourself to the world as you truly were.”

  My index finger slid across the cool, gray reset button and pressed it softly. The console winked to a black screen in a sudden scrambling collapse, and once more the title screen appeared. Bartleby Shaw smiled quietly.

  I retrieved the controller, and rather than starting a new game, I went to enter a password. One by one I punched in the letters: J-U-S-T-I-N B-A-I-L-E-Y. I pressed “start.”

  Samus appeared standing in the middle of Norfair, dressed only in a pink leotard, with wild green hair. I had five Energy Tanks, 255 Missiles, the Varia Suit, the Hi-Jump Boots, the Screw Attack, and the Wave Beam. It was a very cheaty way to play the game. But I saw now that it didn’t matter what abilities I had. It wasn’t about what I could do as Samus Aran—not about what advantages or disadvantages the famous code gave me. It was about playing the game as the true Samus Aran… not hiding who she was behind a red and yellow suit of steel and plastic. Revealing the real Samus only after the credits rolled and things were safe and tidied up was stupid. Cowardly. Irresponsible. Why be real about yourself only when it didn’t matter anymore? Playing the game properly meant revealing the true Samus the whole time, in all her sexy glory, and not feeling stupid about wearing a pink leotard if that’s really what she had on under the suit.

  Bartleby looked on with anticipation as I fought my way to Mother Brain for a second time, much more quickly now with the advanced start of the JUSTIN BAILEY code, and as the last of my missiles slammed into the alien queen and I escaped the long vertical shaft up to the surface of Planet Zebes in a series of frantic, colorful, pink-streaked leotard jumps, I was treated to the bikini ending anyway.

  The controller faded away in my hands. My hyper-powered battle armor faded away too, leaving my avatar, Felicia McFly, standing in Samus’s pink bikini and boots, with only my arm cannon left. I turned, grinning, to regard Bartleby Shaw with pride.

  “That was it,” I said excitedly. “That was the answer, wasn’t it? Hot damn, I’m a smart nerd.”

  He nodded and hugged me, and together we walked through a secret doorway that manifested in midair. Shaw led me to a cluttered room styled like a 1980s attic with a giant red button in the middle. “You now own the O-Face, Felicia.” Shaw said solemnly. “Welcome to my private sanctum. You’ve triumphed over all your rivals, unlocked the deepest secrets of my inner world, and earned your place as the King—or Queen, as you prefer—of this whole land. T
his bright, shining button—”

  “Woo-HOO!” I shouted, cutting him off and slamming my hand down on the big red button. “Victory button! Yeah!”

  Shaw’s mouth dropped open as his face took on a sickly gray pallor, and his mouth twisted in abject horror. “No… god, no… you moron! Why did you do that?”

  My stomach dropped and I stared at him uncertainly. “That wasn’t a victory button?”

  “No, you idiot! That was the ‘Delete Everything’ button which begins an irreversible countdown to the destruction of the entire O-Face!”

  “What? Are you fucking kidding me? Why the hell would you make a button that did that? What could you possibly use it for? You didn’t even include a confirmation dialog!”

  “It seemed like a good idea for some reason! I don’t know. Do you always go around pressing random buttons you find?!”

  “YES! Jesus Christ. What kind of gamer wouldn’t? The master wizard leads you into a room with a big red button after you defeat all his challenges and you expect me not to press it? Fuck, dude. Maybe next time lead with something like ‘In the next room is a big, shiny button you should definitely not press even though it’s super tempting because it deletes everything’ and then walk me in. What the fuck were you thinking?!”

  “My minotaur…” he wailed, falling to his knees. “My legacy… what was I thinking?”

  I sighed as the world dissolved around us and stared grimly at Bartleby Shaw’s stupid, thrice-damned button.

  “I guess you just weren’t thinking, dude. I wasn’t either.”

  Chapter 9

  For a while, everyone was so pissed at me that I became the most prominent meme on the web 5.0. The worst epithet you could hurl at someone on the meta-net was that they’d really “Bowie’d” something up. With the complete and permanent destruction of the O-Face, Roger Dodger had gotten what he wanted, more or less, and went on to fight other stupid morality battles after declaring symbolic victory in his decades-long war against the indecency of VR-sex. He’d immediately doxxed me, publishing my real name, address, and browsing history online, just to add insult to injury, and I became a pariah online and off. Everyone would boo me out of any VR spaces or even old-school style 2D chatrooms where I didn’t take major precautions to conceal my identity, and I could hardly go to the grocery store without catching nasty glares. Even my spiny’s IP address was blacklisted most places.

  W33b and Sherman wouldn’t return my calls, and no matter how much I tried to explain to people that this was really Bartleby Shaw’s fault for sticking a big, tempting button in the first room after my O-Face contest win, nobody believed me. Or if they did believe me, they still thought I was an idiot for slamming down strange buttons I found. The more I thought about it, the less sure I was that they were wrong. It had been kind of reckless, I guess.

  For a while I spent my time trying to get the cops to listen to me about Roger Dodger murdering Sug0i and killing my parakeet, but I didn’t have any real proof that he was behind either of those things, and it turns out that aviacide isn’t technically illegal unless the bird is a protected species. It didn’t help that most of the cops I talked to had played in the O-Face in their off hours and were just as mad at me as everyone else for fucking up the whole thing when I’d been so close to winning. I also soon realized that there was no beat cop dumb enough to go after a powerful Washington politician who’d demonstrated that he was ready and willing to kill people in his path and had the resources to get away with it. Powerful people have been murdering those who stand in their way all throughout history. It just doesn’t usually make the six o’clock news, since they own the news, too.

  With no home left in Wisconsin and not being welcome in W33b’s pad anymore, I had nowhere to turn… I was homeless for a while, scraping by begging for spare credits on the street, until one day Ap0ll0 managed to get a hold of me by using a tracking drone phone.

  “Felicia…” she said, with the speech pattern I was used to hearing from the manly Ap0ll0 reseated in a weird, pretty, feminine voice. And then, “I mean, Bowie… I heard you were living on the street.”

  “Yeah,” I muttered.

  “Not cool,” she said. “Why don’t you come down to Charlotte and crash with me for a while?”

  I kicked at the ground. “Thanks. But I can’t even afford bus fare right now. Not sure they’d let me on if I could.”

  “I got your bus fare, you nerd. Get down here. I have something I want to give you.”

  The drone credited me with one ticket for bus fare to Charlotte, so what else was I going to do? I hopped a futuristic Greyhound to Charlotte and within a day or two I was standing outside of Ap0ll0’s apartment in Neo-Uptown, chewing my lip nervously and worrying about whether this was an elaborate plot to fuck me over and whether Ap0ll0 was actually as hot in real life as she sounded over the phone.

  Eventually I decided that standing awkwardly on Ap0ll0’s front stoop was worse than actually getting up the courage to knock, so I did, and I was shocked when a gorgeous, 5’6” blonde girl opened the door and broke into a wide smile.

  “Bowie!” she exclaimed, diving into my arms for a very boobtacular hug.

  “Ap0ll0?” I asked incredulously.

  She pulled back and grinned at me. “Duh. But you can call me by my real name. Samantha. Samantha Fry. Why do you look so surprised, man?”

  “You—you’re so hot. And… a female.”

  “Dummy.” She laughed. “You really shouldn’t call girls ‘a female.’ All that rule 29 and 30 bullshit really fucked you in the head, huh?”

  “I just…”

  What I wanted to say was that I had no idea what business a girl that hot was doing putting my ass up after everything I’d done, even if she was a gamer girl and we’d been on the adventure of a lifetime together.

  “Cat got your tongue?” she teased, flashing another pretty smile that left me even more tongue-tied than before.

  “Something’s got my tongue for sure,” I mumbled.

  “Come inside,” she offered, opening the door wider. “It’s just me. Relax. I’m the same as the dude you’re used to rolling around with in the O-Face.”

  She was most definitely not. I stood awkwardly in her kitchen, picking at the small shoulder pack that was all that was left of my worldly possessions. “You said you had something to give me?” I asked her.

  “Close your eyes,” she ordered.

  I regarded her suspiciously. “This had really better not be some kind of elaborate humiliation,” I warned her.

  She rolled her eyes. “You’re so paranoid! Just do it, Bowie.”

  So I did.

  She kissed me. Full on the lips, tongue and everything. She smelled like peaches and tasted like strawberries, and her skin was so soft and warm as her body pressed against me that I was instantly in boner town. She laughed as I stepped away.

  “What was that for?” I demanded. “Aren’t you mad at me? How can you kiss me after everything I did?”

  “Eh. I owed you. And you promised we could when things calmed down.” She shrugged. “Yeah, I was mad at first. Real mad. Being Ap0ll0 was pretty fun. The O-Face was a blast. But lately everyone’s been cooling off about the whole thing. I mean, it’s kind of stupid isn’t it? Why would we want to keep dicking around in a theme park fetishizing the cultural zeitgeist of our grandparents’ generation? The more people talk about it online lately, the more everyone is realizing that you did the whole world a favor by deleting that sad train wreck of a mad deviant’s museum to himself. Now we can build something newer—cooler. More modern. Something that appeals to our sensibilities and our nostalgic childhood memories. Isn’t that better? Isn’t that what people want anyway?”

  I thought about it for a minute, scratching the back of my head. It made a lot of sense.

  “But Roger Dodger won!” I protested. “He got everything he wanted, and his Cult of Real Reality—”

  “The CRR got their empty victory and went back to doing what
they were doing anyway. Sitting around in their CRR centers with all the other sad cultists, drinking kool-aid and raging at the world changing around them while looking for other fun things to ruin. Fuck ‘em. What do we care? Now that they feel like they beat VR-sex, they’ll move on to something else. Besides, did you really want the responsibility of running the entire O-Face?”

  I sank onto her couch, forearms resting on my knees, and stared off into space, a little bit dazed. “I guess… I guess not. I’m not very good at actually managing things. I just kind of want to fuck all the time and play videogames and take recreational drugs and live it up with a hot girl. If I’d been left in charge of the O-Face, I probably would have done something monumentally stupid anyway, like turning it off two days a week for arbitrary idealistic reasons that are as dumb as Roger Dodger’s crusade was in the first place.”

  “Exactly,” Samantha agreed, draping herself across my lap and looping her arms around my neck. “And now, a million brilliant creators can make a million fractured private O-Face type playgrounds to hang out in with their friends, and people like Roger Dodger can’t possibly keep up with the deviants of the world and try to censor all of them. It would be a pointless, losing battle. Let him have his dumb symbolic victory.”

  “But why would you be into me?” I demanded, knowing that I was shooting myself in the foot and still needing to know anyway. “I’m a nerdy gamer guy who’s into weird sex stuff and I monumentally fucked up the one thing I ever cared about! I ran around in-game playing a cross-gender avatar for the lulz and explored the depths of depravity pursuing a goal that was ultimately stupid and worthless.”