by Неизвестный
What was he at? It had to have been over one-hundred-million now. Was it all nines? Or would he be the first man to have that tenth digit? He wanted to see the stats, but the distraction might kill him. JON never broke his own rules; he never took his eyes off the combat.
Did J.S worry about the same thing?
He pushed the thought aside. Still more drones coming. There were always more coming.
Room to move was getting scarce. The enemy’s patterns pushed almost to the nose of his fighter, threatening collision, only exploding at the last second as he frantically tried to dig out some space between himself and their endless armada.
It looked like it wasn't even fair, like it wasn’t even possible. They were faster and tougher than Area 16 at the end of the second loop. Area 16 at the end of the third loop had to be the last one, because a fourth Area 16 would likely be unbeatable.
"No..." JON whispered.
His calm broke and he was losing control—for the first time in ages, he began to panic. They were too tightly packed, and they were coming too close before he could destroy them. A collision was imminent. There were two ways out of a run—a pilot either made it through the area and returned to the station, or the pilot spent his last moments in his fighter. It was getting to be too much, even for JON. Today was the day it happened.
Then it stopped, and there was a silence.
Then came the klaxon.
"Mothership!" DAV choked.
"Oh god."
JON looked at the stats.
1. JON - 99999700
He had edged past J.S’s score, but he couldn’t revel in it just yet. The angry, red thing was coming.
The sounds of the lasers and volleys of shots were muted to him. JON let his mind go free, sensing what to do, eyes glazing over, and engaging the synapses of his brain specifically for this moment. He let bullets graze the sides of his fighter gently as if there were no danger in it. He hammered the glowing weak spot of the Mothership with infinite rounds of bullets every chance he got, daring more and more each time, so greedy to destroy that it was beginning to overcome his instincts to protect himself.
And then, the satisfying sound of the explosion, crunching white noise slowly fading into tiny pops and blips, until the one-hundred-million pieces of the ship disappeared.
JON's heart leapt. He had outdone J.S, outdone his own subconscious. Would he retire? Or would he...
JON - 00000250
He was confused. Frozen.
"DAV, my score...what do you see?"
"You're at...00000250..."
"DAV, what happened?"
"You got more than 99999999...I guess that's...what happens."
JON walked through life with his worth proudly displayed above his head. But that's when the first digit was a nine. Now, he might as well be at the beginning of his career, for all it mattered.
He had wanted his score next to the man he admired. He wanted his score next to J.S’s. Now it wouldn’t even be on the board.
"What will I do now?" asked JON. His friend had no answer.
Then came the transmission.
"WE ARE STILL NOT DEFEAT."
They hung there in the blackness.
"Does it matter what I did?"
"I saw it, man," said DAV, "I'll make sure everyone knows you're the first one."
"But the hall of fame. I can't get in. No one will remember this."
"Is that a bad thing, JON?" asked his friend.
"I don't know. What will people say?”
He could have at least rested in the Top 10 if they had just managed to take his life sooner. The enemy let him down.
"JON, my hands are cramped. I've got to take a break. I'm headed back."
JON sat, thinking for a moment about showing his face at the station with a number like 00000250 above his head. It now occurred to him how many people he had judged for having too many zeroes leading their score.
“Are you coming?”
In this silence, in all his confusion, JON’s hands didn’t stop their twitching, their hunger to dodge and weave and return fire. He urged to watch the score climb. He could hear the sound of the white noise as the drones died by his hand.
Watching the score climb, for all these hours...
“I’ve been so stupid...” JON said. DAV didn’t respond.
“This is all for me.” he whispered. His Player 2 remained silent.
“All those zeroes. All those zeroes, right next to my name.”
“The system can’t even handle what you can do...no one was prepared for you to come along!” DAV’s voice seemed unsure if this was glory or the moment JON’s life was crumbling.
JON didn’t move a muscle—he was frozen, gripping the stick as if it was still all happening, as if his body didn’t know anything else.
Who else had rolled back to zero? Anyone who did would not make it into the Hall of Heroes—the number of times they had beaten Area 16 would never have been recorded. Maybe JON wasn’t the first. Maybe JON wasn’t the one-hundredth. Maybe J.S wasn’t the greatest. Maybe the greatest was some unnamed soul whose name never graced the All Time Heroes.
“JON?” DAV called out meekly.
“Maybe...”
JON thought an empty, profound, cold thought, and hesitated a moment before speaking that thought out loud.
“...Maybe this is pointless.”
The Hierarchy of Needs
Ian Miles Cheong
John Hurst awoke at 8:00 a.m. His Bathroom meter was in the yellow, so he went to the bathroom. His Hygiene meter was in the red, so he took a shower. His Hunger meter was also in the red, so he made himself a sandwich, almost starting a stove-top flare-up. They shot back up to green when he was done. It should have been an ordinary day, but then with nary a sound and little excitement, the toilet disappeared.
He lived alone after graduating from university. Having spent all the money he had, Hurst had just moved into his suburban bungalow in sunny Sunset Valley. He was eager to meet his neighbors, the Landises, the Tennos and the Garths, who were equally eager to give him a housewarming as soon as he arrived. He was happy to get to know them, and did his best to ingratiate himself to them with conversations, hugs, and a BBQ party.
It took only two weeks for John to get promoted. It was an unbelievable stroke of luck, but he never questioned his good fortune. Things happened quickly where he lived.
It seemed like life was a simple series of events. Even his job consisted mainly of binary choices. All he had to do to earn his promotion was to do a bit of reading and some exercise, and to befriend his neighbor, Morton Garth, who also happened to be his boss. Becoming friends with Garth involved little more than talking about the weather, it seemed. The weather was always pleasant, and they had pleasant conversations, so Hurst had no complaints.
When he wasn't at work, he was at home, either watching his Fony TV or reading books on his Relax-o-Matic sofa to increase his Skill metrics in practices his boss deemed necessary for further job promotions. This time, he was working on Creativity and Fitness.
He spoke to the Garths to ask if they noticed their toilet disappearing also, but none of them seemed to have any idea what he was talking about. They seemed content to discuss the weather. It was the same with his all his neighbors, none of whom seemed inclined to even humor him. If they knew anything, they weren’t saying so.
He didn’t give it much more thought and went off to work.
When he returned home, things took a turn for the bizarre as soon as he stepped through the front door. His bathroom meter was approaching yellow again from the long day; he felt compelled to search for a toilet, but dimly remembered he didn’t have one any longer.
John stomped his foot like a toddler and groaned something in a language that sounded a little like French at his unfulfilled need, but what frustrated him more was his inability to communicate his utter confusion. But who would he have to talk to anyway?
When he turned around again, his living
room had become a long, windowless corridor lit only by lamps on the wall. He walked down this long corridor only to find a junction of two paths going left and right. He needed badly to pee, but his Hunger meter took priority, and he knew instinctively that he had to turn right if he wanted a bite to eat.
As he turned right, he walked down another long corridor and found a door at the end leading to a makeshift kitchen containing nothing but a fridge and a kitchen counter. As he made himself a sandwich, he began to wonder why things were where they needed to be, and how he knew exactly where to go. He began to realize that he had never made a decision on his own, and had this been an ordinary day, he wouldn't have minded.
“What the fuck is going on here?” He complained loudly to himself.
After consuming his meal, he still needed to deal with the tyranny of his throbbing Bathroom meter, which nearly drowned out his sense of injustice at how he was unable to relieve himself wherever, or whenever he wanted.
“Would it be so wrong to take a piss in the corridor?” He wondered aloud.
He walked back down the long corridor to the junction and headed down the other path, where he suspected there would be a makeshift bathroom.
As he walked further down the new corridor, he heard a thundering jolt behind him. Turning around, he saw that the walls he had passed were no longer there. In their stead was a huge gaping hole where walls were moving and repositioning into a maze. His brain wanted him to flee, but his legs couldn't.
Hurst had no choice but to keep walking down this new corridor, which was as doorless and windowless as the one before, only it seemed to maze left and right at every other juncture with no discernible pattern. It appeared, though, that the scenery was blending together in an endless loop.
Egged on by his bladder, he walked for a few hours, hoping for a change of pace with every occasional turn left or right, still unable to relieve himself. Even so, he knew that he could lose control of his bladder right then and there but chose not to, out of simple shame. Taboo was not a new concept to him. It had been assimilated into his functions for as long as he could remember. It was as if he had been programmed to feel it, and he gave into that impulse.
“What’s happening?” He wondered aloud. His biological functions were the only things keeping him from getting “lost” in this hellish maze. Yet, at the same time, he had come to realize that were it not for his biological functions, he would have been able to attempt escape of the maze by walking in a direction not plotted out by whoever was designing it.
He felt helpless. The meter was almost empty, deep in the red. He couldn't hold it anymore. It needed to be green again or he would burst. He couldn't help it. He lost control, right then and there. It wasn’t something he did willingly, and he felt the pain of shame as he wet himself all over the corridor.
“Ah, fuck you!” He cried in anguish to no one who would ever hear it.
At that point, a door appeared in front of him which lead to the outside world. He was free, but he didn’t know what to do with himself. The maze transformed back into his comfortable, familiar home. His humiliation would fade into another memory, like graduation day and the big move to sunny Sunset Valley.
The very next day, he couldn’t shake the knowledge he had gleaned, but he knew that there was nothing he could do about it. Instead, he asked the Garths about the weather. It was pleasant.
Slow Leak
Rollin Bishop
But when he knew he heard
Odysseus’s voice nearby, he did his best
to wag his tail, nose down, with flattened ears,
having no strength to move nearer his master.
—Homer, The Odyssey (1049–1052)
Of everything, the sky is what I find hurts the most. The people, the places, the various thoroughfares...Those are the kinds of things that come and go on a fairly regular basis. Folks leave; buildings are torn down; streets are renamed or diverted. The sky, though. Well. The sky is a thing of beauty that shifts in color but never really leaves. That’s what I might have said before. Then it left.
Not all at once. If it’d gone that quickly, we’d have noticed. The stars were snuffed out one by one, then by the handful, and finally even the moon was gone. It was only as the last few twinkling lights were burning out that the bits and pieces came together to form a cohesive whole.
The days were full of questions. Folks congregated en masse at city hall only to have their concerns rephrased and repeated back to them. The best they could do was tell us that we should just stay inside and wait it—whatever it was—out. The mayor said she’d already been in contact with mayors from neighboring towns and would let us know as soon as she’d heard back from them. She finished her speech by telling us we worried too much.
Then people started to disappear.
***
Our town never had been a populous place. It was really just an extension of the two towns to our north and west. As folks moved south from the one, and east from the other, the two dozen or so of us decided it was about time we had a mayor of our own. We all just referred to our little patch of real estate as Southeast, as something of a glib reminder of our origins.
That two dozen soon became three dozen. Small businesses began to sprout on every corner. A drugstore here, a comic shop there. And the kids. The kids were probably the best thing about it. There’s always something joyous about watching children make discoveries of their own. Though I never did have any of my own (not for lack of trying, mind) the gaggle of pint-sized monsters kept me busy when I volunteered to watch them. It was enough, for a while.
Then times got hard. Folks left, stopped calling on each other. Our happy little town became a place of doldrums, filled with nothing but memories of better times. When I asked the mayor what’d happened to cause such a rift, she shrugged at me and said, “Hard to get people to stay when there’s always somewhere to go.” I reckon she was right.
So it came to be that there were only a grand total of eight, counting the mayor, when the stars went dark. The stores had been all boarded up for a long time, and we mostly kept to ourselves. I would ask the mayor what she’d received back from the other towns, but she always said that there’d been no word. After a week, I got worried. After three, so did she. We’d both failed to notice at the time that three of our meager group had joined the stars, wherever they were.
Eight had become five. Then the power went out.
***
After the power went, and didn’t come back, I hesitantly asked the mayor what we’d do when all the food was gone. She gave me an incredulous look, raised a brow and told me, “What makes you think you need it?” I stopped eating after that.
The nights weren’t dark so much as they were absent. Without the stars, moon, or power, it was like the world ended each time the sun went down. Each morning, those of us left would congregate at the hall. There were only three of us when the buildings started to go. First it was all those rundown shops that hadn’t seen use in ages. Then, one by one, the abandoned houses were gone.
I quietly came to terms with the fact that I’d probably be one of the next to go. Fear seemed like a curious thing more than a fact of life. Why be afraid of something when you’re certain it’s going to happen? When I stopped eating it didn’t stop the hunger. I apparently didn’t need the food, but I certainly wanted it. The cold nothingness would be a welcome reprieve from the endless gnawing sensation in the pit of my stomach.
Somewhere during that feverish time the last of the townsfolk slipped out of existence.
Then it was just the mayor and me, left to wait.
***
When the sun finally didn’t bother to even come up, the mayor and I bunkered down in the candlelit portions of city hall, both for the sake of our sanity and because my house finally drifted off to join the others. The darkness encroached upon the doors but went no further. The candles and lanterns the mayor lit stayed that way. I would have asked how but, to be honest, I was a litt
le afraid of the answer. Instead, I quietly suffered my hunger and let her do as she pleased.
Her office quickly became a pile of pages, full of calculations and strange words. She’d taken to mumbling about “servers” and “admins” while doodling equations and maps at all hours. The constant hunger finally subsided into one long, hollow feeling, and her behavior became more overtly erratic. When I did eventually try to intervene, she shrugged me off. Then, as if something had suddenly struck her, she straightened and stared me down, taking my measure.
“I’m going to make you a mod,” she said. I told her that was fine and dandy, but it didn’t mean a thing to me. She chuckled before returning to her work. I curled up in the corner, ultimately too tired to fight her turn to whimsy, and fell asleep. When I awoke, I wasn’t hungry anymore, but the mayor was gone.
She’d left a note on her desk. “Off to find other admins,” it read. “No hope of bringing the servers back up without them. Hold the office till I return. I’m sorry to put this on you but there was no other choice. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Promise.” I folded the note up and stuffed it in my pocket.
She’d be back. She promised. I just had to wait.
***
So here I am. Present, I guess. Time’s fuzzy without the sun or moon cycling through the void that used to be the sky. Don’t rightly know how long it’s been since she left. Just know I want her to come back. Don’t feel hungry, or tired, just… sad. I cry when I feel up to it, quietly, and then stop when I can’t any longer. Sit in the chair watching the door. Nothing happens. It’s been too long. She isn’t coming. Perhaps someone, anyone at all, will find this among the mayor’s unintelligible doodles.
Just want it to be over. Want it to end. Nobody here anymore. Not even me. Just an empty room. Empty room and a door. Just close my eyes, maybe. Maybe see what everyone else is seeing. What’s the point? Point stopped existing a long time ago. Time to stop. Time to end this. Sounds good. Sounds so good.
I imagine her opening the door. Put a smile on my face one last time. Bliss. “I waited for you,” I’d say. “I waited.”