Sleep Over

by H. G. Bells

  Someone else did an impressive run to a nether fortress and managed to collect three Wither heads, a rare drop from one of the formidable enemies that spawn in that hellish dimension. He assembled them to make the Wither Boss and defeated it to gain a nether star, with which he built a Beacon. His victory screenshot was beautiful: his avatar, in a skin he’d designed himself, looking like a marble statue, standing in front of the lit beacon beaming into the sky, a diamond sword in his hand, a chicken peeking cheekily into the frame near his feet.

  There were other speed runs for Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, Zelda—anything under the sun was an option. If you had a game, you played it. Every online community had its coordination hub, and we invented scores of quests to compete at, to try and best each other and prove our gaming prowess, how 1337 we were (oh come on, 1337? Using numbers as letters is called 1337speak, “leet-speak,” from being an elite hacker or gamer or programmer or whatevs).

  You get the picture. I know you might not care about it, but it mattered in several ways. First, as I said, the online worlds kept more people alive than any other medium. We were lost in our games, inside, unmoving; we were conserving energy, and we were safe. Surely if the world didn’t end, we thought an army of neckbearded man-boys and thirteen-year-old Call of Duty brats were going to inherit the earth. A chilling thought, especially for the women of earth.

  (Side note: the gender disparity was much misjudged by the general public, as well as by gamers themselves. Before the plague, fully 45 percent of gamers were female. Perhaps it was their proclivity to create male characters, and mute their mics, so that they were treated as men and not called out for being “gamer chicks,” worked to proliferate the stereotype of gamers being men. But Gender Issues in Gaming is a whole other book in itself. The main point is that we were almost as many women as we were men.)

  All right, so what we had was a force of people staying inside, playing games, day in and day out. We were busying ourselves in the digital realms, keeping out of trouble and conserving our physical energy by focusing entirely on our games.

  Psychologists were already understanding that such games were changing our brains. The reward-based systems were addicting. There was seemingly nothing gamers wouldn’t do to fill up a little bar, to increase their stats, to level up. Across the board, humans like seeing their progress as tangible representations, and gaming is the first thing in the history of humanity to do it so efficiently, to pull in the human mind so greatly that people have died of dehydration while ensconced in their games.

  We had engineered something brilliant. All those gaming quests, all that competition, it was preparing us for the greatest quest of our lives.

  Sure, some of us weren’t necessarily the most ept with real world situations. We had embraced our kingdoms of digital villains and leveling up and hoarding treasure and rare items, and the real world couldn’t hope to compete with it, not when you did a cost-benefit analysis. For a $70 game on my already-bought console, I could eek out hundreds of hours of gameplay. And when I finished, I could make an entirely new character and come at it from a different angle. A righteous paladin one play-through, a sneaky assassin thief the next. What in the real world could compete with that?

  And people were hungry to get things done. People would join together on servers (hubs that hosted games for people all around the world) and random strangers would ask, “What can I do?” We wanted to help, we wanted jobs. We wanted to push that level-up bar higher and higher, we wanted to see the fruits of our labor and share them with others who would understand our accomplishments.

  So when the power finally went out, the gamers did one of two things. A swath of them killed themselves pretty much right away. You can’t just become another person and have that level of community interaction, that level of quest-reward system pumped into your veins for weeks straight, and not feel such despair when you’re unplugged, and thrust back into a world on fire, suddenly feeling the horrendous effects of the insomnia you’d been ignoring.

  The rest of us, well, we had conditioned our brains to fit the questing model so perfectly that it wasn’t really that surprising that we tried to transpose it into the real world. People had been taking about the game layer for a few years, and its time had finally come.

  We had predesignated times and places picked out for meetings. We weren’t so far removed from what was happening that we didn’t understand that the world was ending. We were just watching from the sidelines, from the safety of our online boards, from livestreams, from the constant updates on our favorite news aggregators.

  So when the power went out in any given city, we had anticipated it, and we already had plans.

  We all had our frickin’ zombie-apocalypse contingencies, you think we couldn’t adapt and come up with something for an actual apocalypse as it was occurring? It was cake. Sure, having grand schemes on a message board online was one thing; enacting the plans in the real world was entirely another matter. But we came together.

  I don’t want to brag (Just kidding, I think I had a big part in organizing the rebuilding of the world? Hell yes, I’ll brag.) but the Game Of Life Stat Sheet was my creation.

  When we finally fell asleep, those of us that woke up emerged and found the world in shambles. We enacted Plan “Game of Life.” My Game Of Life Stat Sheet (shortened to G.O.L.S. Sheet, eventually just GOLS, like “goals”) was widely distributed at that point. I’m sure everyone thought it was a joke. And it sort of was. But when the despair hit, when we could have just laid down and died, instead we had stat bars to fill.

  There were many places with success stories stemming from using GOLS, but I guess you wanted mine, so I’ll give it to you. Keeping in mind, as of course I imagine you must for every entry into this collection, that I have a massive bias. I will try and be as truthful as I can be, but, well, there’s no instant replay here. No screencasts, livestreams, no Twitch.

  All the radio broadcasts, and any newscasters on TV before the power died, were drilling the same things into us. If you fall asleep and wake up and all this is over, go to the town hall. Go to the town hall. There will be people at the town hall. Those poor reporters, trying to keep themselves awake enough to deliver news until the bitter end. But at least they got it into our heads to go to our town halls when/if the plague was ever over.

  So to the town hall we went. We were all young. We were pretty much all between the age of nineteen and fifty. Maybe we don’t need as much sleep as we get older, but perhaps we need it more, to repair our bodies as we age. Being young and healthy and vital was no protection: the ones that need the most sleep, for their brains to develop, the under-nineteen crowd, needed drastically, fatally more sleep.

  So as we assembled, we fell into a hierarchy of leadership sort of cobbled together on the fly. Mrs. Barsol, the principal of the high school, was there, and she was as solid and fierce as I remembered. Many of us had been to her office for a scolding or a pep talk or just for a person to listen to us.

  We silently nominated her to lead us. There were others, but as the majority of us seemed to have been led by her before, or knew her as an important pillar of the community, we decided that she was best. The mayor’s son didn’t like that at all, but I loudly reminded him that we didn’t elect leaders by primogeniture. I took Mrs. Barsol aside and told her, somewhat sheepishly, of the GOLS sheet. I pulled mine from my pocket and unfolded it. She listened and nodded as I tried to explain to her, just as I did to you, how our brains had been trained, and how I thought we could use it to our advantage. If only we could be led. If only someone could give us quests. She listened and let me get to the end of my unpracticed explanation, then paused to formulate her response while I waited nervously.

  “The world was full of quests before, but now I think they are much more apparent,” she said with a half smile. “Do you have copies?” she asked. I nodded, relief flooding over me to know that I’d made my point well enough for her to get it, and that she was open to the
idea of actually giving it a try.

  Our town had gone from roughly 6,500 down to 358, well below the global survival rate of just under 8 percent, mostly due to our average age being very skewed towards the retired and the very young, both demographics having a much lower survival rate.

  We were a small enough group that we could know most everyone, or already did. Several of my friends were there. My piano teacher was there. One of the people from my street was there.

  But I only had five copies of the GOLS. I handed one to Mrs. Barsol, and she looked it over, then nodded.

  “Add something to it that gives a level up for every day. Every single day that someone has this sheet, they need to be able to tick something off on it or add to an XP bar.” My jaw dropped. She gave me that half smile again, though her eyes began to glisten with tears. “My son used to play games, and some of them he would only log onto to get the daily reward, even if he wasn’t playing it that day. Can you add it?”

  “Can you help me copy the sheets? We need more.”

  And that’s how I was introduced to Jeremy Pendragon, who became my right hand, my confidant, my friend. He managed to pump most of his levels into one of the five custom stat slots.

  The GOLS were pretty all encompassing, general skills, but I knew everyone would want to have room to show off their particular niche talents, so I left five slots blank, as Personal Special Stats (PSSs). Jeremy’s were Book Binding, Papercraft, Candle Dipping, Wick Weaving, and, his highest PSS, Penmanship.

  Jeremy Pendragon and I set up in a conference room at the town hall and began copying GOLS. His hand was steady and practiced. Mine was okay, but not nearly so beautiful; after a few side-by-side comparisons, it became clear that I should let the artisan take over the work he was most suited to, and I helped Mrs. Barsol with some other things.

  That night we had a meeting. There were many meetings all over the world in those days, those wonderful days when we had slept, those awful days when we had woken up to find how close we can come to extinction.

  I had the floor to speak my piece, to pitch GOLS to them. I knew it was going to be hard to get non-gamers to understand it at first; I tried to come at it from the psychology of it, sort of like the explanation I offered you earlier. Seems reasonable, right?

  I wasn’t prepared for them to reject me outright.

  “We need to be consolidating the food into a centralized location, clearing bodies; we don’t have time for any of this,” said an older man in the crowd. Older, as in, perhaps late forties. Not old old, not by a long shot. Well, not old before. Now he had a good forty or fifty years to be one of the oldest people on the planet.

  “We’ll only help organize things, and to build morale; don’t you want to keep track of your accomplishments?”

  “If we don’t all die of some plague from the bodies, I’ll count it as a morale booster. Now cut it out with this game layer crap and let’s talk about real life problems,” he said gruffly, earning some minor mutterings of approval from those around him. I sighed but didn’t want to leave it so easily.

  “We’ll do the other stuff, too,” I said, sweeping my gaze over everyone, “but if anyone wants to be in on this, it’s going to be fun. We need fun still. It’ll be motivational, it’ll be good,” I said, hoping my explanation from earlier would garner at least a few followers. “We’ll stay and talk, after the other things have been discussed. Join us.” Join us, even though it was just me and Jeremy, and maybe Mrs. Barsol. Trying to get the feeling of a group in there, welcoming, exciting.

  I stepped off the stage and took up a spot against the wall. Someone was talking about clearing the roads when Jeremy whispered to me.

  “Good job, we’ll get there,” he said. I nodded, and we waited out the other speakers, volunteering on road clearing and reconnaissance respectively. After Mrs. Barsol called the meeting to a close, she did me the honor of adding to it for my benefit.

  “And now, party creation will begin for the Gibsons Rebuilding Committee. Anyone wishing to join us, please stay. The rest, we’ll begin bright and early tomorrow.” She banged something on the podium which signaled an end to her bit, and those in the town hall rose and filed out. Jeremy and I sauntered up to the stage, and I’ll admit I was nervous to see just how many would be staying behind to join us. Mrs. Barsol perhaps saw this, and dropped down to sit on the end of the stage, where Jeremy and I pressed in, waiting, not daring to look back at the crowd to see who would be staying.

  “Jeremy, Riley, how many people are usually in a D&D party?” she asked, perhaps to distract me from my nervousness. Jeremy and I glanced at each other in brief council.

  “Five? Any more than six gets problematic,” I explained, “but up to eight can work.” I’d been in a group once, and we’d run two campaigns—one with five, and one with nine, and the DM (Dungeon Master, also sometimes called the GM [Game Master]) had a heck of a time keeping the game going when we were nine.

  “Looks like we’re in luck then,” she said, nodding over our shoulders. I turned then and was met with five others.

  Two were girls, or I guess I should say young women. They were in their midtwenties, both blond, one tall, taller than me, and one about five eight. They were there as a team. I shook their hands.

  “I’m Riley,” I said.

  “Laura,” said the taller one.

  “Betty,” said her friend.

  There were two boys, or I guess I should say young men. One was maybe just out of high school, perhaps one of the youngest in our town, and the other looked related to him, but older by perhaps half a decade.

  “Riley,” I said, extending my hand to the younger one first.

  “Ashley,” he said.

  “Rick,” said his . . . brother? I was certain they were related.

  The fifth was a large man. Not large like overweight, but large like a lumberjack. He had a beard. He looked like he was in his late forties. I silently rejoiced that he in particular joined us—if “we” were all “kids,” it’d be much harder to be taken seriously.

  I shook his hand and he had a handshake to end handshakes.

  “Al,” he said. “I hope you know what you’re doing here, I’m sticking my neck out. You seem like you’re going to do something interesting here though. So let’s hear it.” Al didn’t mess around.

  “Right,” I said.

  “This is Jeremy,” I said, introducing him so he wouldn’t fade into the woodwork like so many gamers were used to doing.

  “Jeremy, Riley, Laura, Betty, Ash, Rick, Al, and Mrs. Barsol,” I said.

  “Please, Mrs. Barsol was my slave name,” she said. “Call me Jay.”

  “Yes,” said Jeremy, pulling out the copied GOLS to distribute, “yes this is the time to choose a new name. Now because it’s a Real Life Stat Sheet,” he said with some bemusement, “we should keep it to something plausible. Nicknames, middle names, something fun, but rooted in our real life lives. I’m going to go by my last name, Pendragon,” he said. I only got it just then—his handwriting skills were perhaps acquired and honed to make use of his fierce last name, a skilled scribe, a loquacious letterer.

  “Riley hardly needs another name,” said Laura. I hoped that hot feeling on my cheeks wasn’t me blushing but I’m sure I was, though I couldn’t yet tell if it was because I was being made fun of (my instinct) or because she was going somewhere with her observation.

  “I mean,” continued Laura, “I always thought Rye was what they called you, right?” she asked. “And it’s like wry, like clever,” she clarified. Her friend Betty elbowed her in the side.

  “Or rye like the grain, rye bread,” she said with a hiss.

  “Either way, I like it,” I said. They looked at me to gauge my sincerity. I nodded and held my hand out to Jeremy for a pencil. He plunked one in my palm and I slapped my sheet down on the stage.

  “Ry, R, Y,” I said. “Then no one will know which it is meant to be,” I said.

  “Cool beans,” said Ashley. Jeremy
handed him a pen. “I’ve been running from my name my whole life. It’s flippin’ bad enough having the last name Rash, and I don’t care if it’s ethnic. Ash Rash? Jesus man, I don’t ever want to hear that name again. Bro?” he asked his (confirmed) older brother Rick, who nodded.

  “Going with Fee?” he asked.

  “How did . . . how did you know?” he answered.

  “Like I’ve never seen your gravatar pop up online. A phoenix rising from the ash,” said Rick, rolling his eyes. “A bit obvious, bro. But go for it,” he said. “I’m going to stay with just Rick though,” he said. I nodded. Jeremy passed the pens out to everyone, and we lined up against the stage to use it as a desk.

  “Yeah man, no pressure, that’s cool,” I said. Trying to let them know that it was up to them. No pressure, no judgement. That was the best part of being a nerd. Once you got to the point of being made fun of, that’s when you knew someone was your friend. Until then, utter respect for one another’s ideas was paramount. We didn’t know the party dynamic yet.

  “And I’ll keep Al, but I might add a middle name later, I haven’t decided.”

  “Laura stays Laura,” she said.

  “And Betty, stays, well, maybe just Bett.”

  It’s amazing how just the simple act of taking charge of your name can be so empowering. Names define us from the day we’re given them, and yet we have no control over them at all. As soon as you get a GOLS sheet and you fill in your name you make it your own. It gives you dominion over your life in a way you’ve never felt before (unless you were already a gamer—I’d had more names than I can remember). It was a good first taste of the control and order to come.

  Jeremy, Riley, Laura, Betty, Ash, Rick, Al, and Mrs. Barsol became a party then, became Pendragon, Ry, Laura, Bett, Fee, Rick, Al, and Jay. I know it’s hard to keep track of names, and you don’t really need to. I just wanted to get that down, because those are the names of the people that helped me save our town, and that helped spread GOLS across the continent. Early adopters should be recognized for putting themselves out there against the majority. So while you might not remember them, I count this as a historical document, and I think it’s important for them to be remembered, for them to go down in history.