Smells Like Finn Spirit

by Randy Henderson

  Inky made his way through the maze of invisible obstacles toward me again.

  Sagat shouted, “Tiger!” and threw an energy attack at me. I jerked to the side, feeling the heat of the fireball as it flew by—and was knocked forward to the floor as an empty steel barrel smashed into my left shoulder from behind.

  Donkey Kong gave a mocking electronic bark of laughter and stomped his feet.

  With my face pressed to the cool concrete floor, my body a mass of aches and pains, my magic having abandoned me, my entire life pulled out from beneath my feet, I considered just saying screw it and lying there.

  I was pretty well done with life dealing me problem after problem.

  But I was not alone in all of this. And if I quit, it would be on my terms, not because some bastard hiding behind a bunch of illusions beat me down. I hadn’t let the Fey break me in all those years of feeding on my memories. I wasn’t going to break now. Well, not as far as my will went anyway. My bones, they were a different matter.

  I made some very manly whimpering noises at the pain, then crawled away from my opponents and back to my feet one more time.

  I took a gamble and launched a front kick at Sagat. He sidestepped and blocked the kick, knocking it aside. But rather than turn and re-engage as my foot hit the floor, I kept going, charging at Inky. At the last minute, I veered away from the ghost as well.

  As I’d hoped, Inky turned to my left and floated toward the corner of the room, obeying the pattern not only programmed into the Ms. Pac-Man machine but luckily into my conception of who Inky was.

  Then I turned to confront Sagat. I had little confidence I could beat him physically—even if the sorcerer wasn’t actually as great a fighter as Sagat, he could trick my brain into thinking he was—and I didn’t trust Alynon’s Fey butt tattoo to protect me from Sagat’s energy blasts since they were likely illusions, not true balls of magical fire. Which left only one option I could think of. After all, illusions operated on something closer to dream logic than the rules of reality.

  I squatted into a warrior stance, pressed my wrists together with my palms facing out, and shouted, “Hadoken!”

  Nothing happened.

  Sagat shouted, “Tiger!” and launched another energy attack back at me. I dropped flat to my stomach, letting the attack pass over me in a wave of heated air. Then I pushed quickly back to my feet.

  *Bad move, Space Cadet,* Alynon said again.

  I frowned. “Not helpful.”

  *Chicken! Fight like a robot!*

  My eye twitched. Alynon and this entire situation was enough to drive me berserk. But as I dodged another energy attack from Sagat, and a pie from Donkey Kong, it occurred to me what he might mean by fighting like a robot.

  I faced Sagat, squatted straight down, then moved up and forward in a rising arc, and thrust my joined hands forward again, mimicking the joystick movements needed for the attack. “HADOKEN!”

  Air exploded out of the area in front of my hands as a blue-white ball of vacuum energy formed and shot straight for Sagat.

  Sagat fell apart faster than Ab Fab’s Edina and Patsy at a detox clinic.

  But no sorcerer waited beneath the dissipating pieces of Sagat.

  Rather, Dawn stood blinking at me. In a frilly pink dress.

  “What the—Dawn?” I asked.

  “Finn? What the hell’s going on. One second you were one of The Gentlemen trying to steal my voice—”

  That was definitely Dawn. I rushed over to her and gave her a hug.

  As soon as I embraced Dawn, a giant 8-bit heart appeared above us, and Donkey Kong gave a loud digitized growl of anger and flipped over onto his head. With an electronic trill of music, he melted down into the floor.

  Dawn’s pink princess dress disappeared, replaced by her own brown jeans and gray T-shirt.

  “Can you see Sammy, or anyone else?” I asked Dawn.

  “No,” she replied.

  “Damn it.” Inky began moving toward us. Dawn followed my gaze, and startled.

  “Is that seriously a Pac-Man ghost?”

  “Yes, and it seriously might hurt us.” I pulled Dawn after me and ran down the hall to the garage’s entrance room again. It should be easy enough to keep avoiding Inky, but eventually I’d get tired or make a mistake, and I wasn’t sure what—

  “Intruder alert!” a robotic voice announced from above. “Intruder alert!”

  The yellow smiley face clock dropped from the wall and began bouncing toward us.

  Someone wasn’t interested in giving me time or room to figure out what to do next. I led Dawn back up the second hall to the arcade room.

  *Warrior needs food badly,* Alynon said in his digitized voice.

  “I’m not that hurt,” I said.

  “What?” Dawn asked.

  *No! Red warrior needs food badly,* Alynon repeated.

  Did he mean literally? What food? The mac and cheese? Or—

  I looked at Inky. It seemed ridiculous, but no more so than anything else that had just happened.

  I dragged Dawn to the conveyer belt, praying there were no unseen obstacles between me—or my groin—and my goal. I reached the belt, felt the counter’s edge dig into my lower stomach.

  Aly, if you can understand me, and can see the actual PowerBars, I need you to take control and grab one!

  *Prepare to Qualify!* Digi-Alynon responded.

  My hand jerked up of its own volition—or rather by Alynon’s control—and grabbed a pie off the belt. It transformed in my hand into an 8-bit candy bar.

  *You’re all clear, kid …* Alynon said, his voice winding down like a robot running out of power, the last word distorted and low.

  I peeled open the candy bar wrapper to reveal a glowing bar that pulsed with white light. I took a large bite.

  As soon as I did, I tasted chalky chocolate and peanut butter.

  But more importantly, Inky turned dark blue.

  Regardless of what Alynon might say, my mouth was not large enough to chomp a four-foot ghost. But I’d seen the Pac-Man cartoon, and in that all he had to do was remove the ghost costume from the invisible spirit.

  I charged at Inky, grabbed a handful of digital ghost sheet, and yanked.

  Inky flashed for a second, and then his eyes floated away to the far corner.

  In the cartoon, whenever a ghost died, its eyes floated back to its master, Mezmaron. In this case, I hoped my deeper mind was aware of where the sorcerer stood despite the illusions, and had directed the eyes there.

  “Reveal yourself!” I demanded in the direction of the eyes, as much an order of mental will as a request.

  “FINAL LEVEL,” boomed a digitized voice.

  The ghost eyes faded, and an illusory Tron materialized in their place. He reached back, and grabbed the identity disc from between his shoulders. The Frisbee-like disc lit up with neon blue lines, illuminating his grin. “Give it up, Finn One,” he said. “Don’t make me bring in the logic probe.” He cocked back his arm to throw the disc.

  “Finn!” Dawn shouted. She ripped one of the digitized hubcaps off the wall and tossed it to me. As I caught it, it turned into an identity disc with neon red lines as Tron’s disc flew at me. I grabbed mine with both hands and held it in front of me like a shield just in time to deflect Tron’s attack. I flinched at the force of the blow as it rang through my wrists. Illusory or not, he had a heck of a throwing arm. His disc bounced off of mine, ricocheted off a wall and flew back to him trailing a tail of ghostly blue light.

  I cocked my arm back, took aim, and threw my disc hard in a vertical slice at his head.

  Tron raised his hand, and my disc bounced off of it and went spiraling away somewhere behind me.

  “Surrender,” he said. “Or face immediate deresolution.”

  “Screw this game bullshit,” Dawn said, and charged at Tron.

  “Halt!” Tron shouted.

  “Dawn!” I called in warning.

  Dawn ignored us both. At the same time, my disc zigzagged bac
k to me, and I snagged it out of the air.

  Dawn plowed into Tron with open arms to tackle him—but she passed right through him. As she did, she screamed, and fell to the ground, twitching and gasping for air. If her entire body had just suffered the kind of freezing shock I’d felt when punching through Inky, her heart and lungs could well be frozen—or at least, she believed they were. And she might not survive that illusion.

  “Damn you!”

  I’d thought Tron was finally the sorcerer, but he was just another decoy. Another weapon.

  Tron smiled. “Your user can’t help you now, program.”

  *Finn One,* Alynon’s voice said groggily, *get your disc into the heart of the MCP.*

  “I’m trying!” I said, and threw my disc at Tron again, willing it to break through his defenses, trying to believe that it would succeed, to make my will the illusion’s reality.

  Tron deflected my disc again, and threw his disc at me.

  I did my best to spin out of the way, but the disc grazed my right side, and my rib cage spasmed in fiery pain as 8-bit squares of blood and cloth fell to the floor.

  “Aaahh!” I fell to one knee. My disc ricocheted off of the nearby wall and flew back to me like a red comet. I reached up to grab it and nearly passed out from the rush of searing agony that flared out from my injured side. Tron’s disc zigzagged through the air back to him, its glowing blue tail almost cartoon-like—which didn’t make it any less deadly.

  “There’s nothing special about you,” Tron said. “You’re just an ordinary program.”

  “I’m also better than you,” I replied.

  *Get your disc into the heart of the MCP!* Alynon said again, frustration clear in his tone now.

  “I told you, I’m tryi—” I blinked, and looked over at the Tron game cabinet.

  All of the other games had been there in reality. But there had been no Tron cabinet before the illusion.

  And on the screen, the small Tron figure was blasting away at a rainbow barrier as he tried to enter the MCP cone.

  “Stop!” Tron said. “I’m afraid you—”

  I threw my disc at the Tron game screen. At the same time, Tron threw his disc at me.

  My disc struck the game machine just a second before Tron’s disc reached me.

  The illusions shivered, wavered. I saw a stocky man with a goatee holding his chest and wincing in pain, overlaid with the image of the Tron arcade cabinet.

  Tron’s disc shattered into a thousand tiny square bits as it struck me.

  “End of line, asshole,” I said as I charged at the sorcerer.

  He fumbled at his jacket pocket as a wall of fire erupted up out of the floor between me and the sorcerer as a desperate, reflexive illusion. I plowed through the flames with barely a tingle and saw the sorcerer leveling a wand at me. I gave the sorcerer a front kick to the gut just as he had begun to speak the activation phrase for the wand.

  He collapsed to the floor, gasping, and the illusions vanished altogether, the room and its contents returning to normal.

  I snatched up the wand from him, then looked to Dawn. Her spasms calmed, and she sucked in a deep breath like someone emerging from a dive.

  I scanned the rest of the room, but saw no other sorcerers. Sammy still sat at the makeshift desk, her left hand twitching slightly in the modified Power Glove, but she appeared otherwise frozen.

  I kicked the sorcerer hard in the gut again so that he fell forward onto his elbows, retching. I rushed over to Sammy, and lifted up the visor.

  Sammy’s eyes were blank, staring at nothing.

  “Sammy!” I said, and gently turned her head to look into her eyes. Still nothing. I could sense her spirit, but her consciousness was another question. I felt panic rising in my chest, but I pushed it down and marched back to the sorcerer, my empty fist clenching, the wand shaking in the other.

  12

  FREE YOUR MIND

  The sorcerer sat against the black wall between two arcade game cabinets, his goatee quivering, and he waved one hand between us as if trying to push me away with the Force. I grabbed his wrist. I didn’t know any fancy submission holds or anything yet, but I pushed him back, off balance, and said, “If you don’t answer my questions, I’ll rip out your spirit and compel the answers out of your corpse.” A total bluff unless I was willing to use the spirit trap and more dark necromancy to do so. A terrible idea on several levels. Though if it meant saving Sammy’s mind—

  The sorcerer shook his head. “Anything you can do to me, your grandfather can do far worse.” He clearly tried to utter that bad TV dialogue with something like conviction, but his voice wavered uncertainly.

  “What happened to my sister?” I demanded.

  He pressed his lips together and looked away.

  I summoned his spirit, just to give my bluff some teeth.

  Or at least, I tried. It was like trying to grasp a beam of light. I just couldn’t hold on to the summoning.

  Frak!

  I kicked him in the gut one more time.

  When he was done gasping, I shouted, “What happened to my sister, damn it!”

  “She was snooping where she shouldn’t,” he said, his words becoming slurred. “And now her mind is trapped.”

  Dawn stepped up beside me, her breathing still a bit raggedly, and put a hand on my shoulder. “You okay? You’re not, you know, going darkside or anything?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, irritated at the question—or more honestly, irritated at the perfectly real need for the question.

  “Go help Sammy,” she said. “I’ll keep an eye on Mind Games here. If he—”

  The sorcerer gave an ape-like grunt, and waved at Dawn. “Want!” He stared at her.

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  Great. “He’s in caveman mode,” I replied. “It’s a kind of mental backlash from using so much sorcery. His higher brain functions basically shut down for a while.” Sorcerers who pushed too far could even suffer a complete shut down to the point where they basically forgot how to breathe, and died. “Don’t worry though, that usually means he’s too wiped out to actually act on any of those lizard brain impulses.”

  *Your sister remains trapped,* Alynon said in a tired voice, *and time is short. Mayhap you should end this sorcerer, and question his spirit.*

  I’m not killing a defenseless man, or a defensed man for that matter if I can help it. And I wasn’t sure I could summon his spirit regardless.

  *He would have killed you. And you can claim it was self-defense if you but—*

  Drop it, I thought. “If he starts getting too active, let me know,” I said to Dawn.

  *At least knock him out to be safe,* Alynon urged.

  I’m not up for hitting him in the head repeatedly, either, I thought as I crossed to Sammy. As well as that might work in the movies, I knew enough from my experience in the necrotorium—and more recent personal experience—that any blow hard enough to knock him out might also kill him, or cause serious damage. And as much as I felt the burning desire to strangle the little mind weasel, I couldn’t bring myself to beat a guy over the head repeatedly, not when he was just sitting there.

  And, I realized, that was probably what Alynon wanted. If I killed the sorcerer, there was a good chance I’d be exiled for it—and Alynon would get to go home. Assuming we survived the current crisis, of course.

  I moved to Sammy while Dawn kicked the sorcerer hard in the groin, causing him to collapse into a fetal position on the floor. She saw my frown, and said, “What? He looked like he was getting up.”

  I sighed, but didn’t say anything.

  I sat down next to Sammy. On her laptop screen, a glowing purple sphere pulsed within a cage made of golden bars.

  My hand hovered over the keyboard for a second, then closed into a fist. I had no idea what to do, how to help.

  Helen peeked out from the hallway, once again appearing like a young woman with a Cleopatra cut. She looked around the room, and then frowned at Sammy.

&nb
sp; “Connection status?”

  “Her mind is trapped,” I said. “Some kind of infomancer spell.”

  “You’re either a one or a zero. Alive or dead. She must become one on her own.”

  “Uh, okay. How?”

  “She can carry nearly eighty gigs of data in her head. Gain data access.”

  I frowned. “So … we need to help her reconnect with her memories, her consciousness?”

  Helen nodded.

  “Can you share my memories with her?” I asked. “I can use those to lead her back to herself.”

  Helen shook her head. “Not my game.”

  Meaning she didn’t have the mind reading gift. Damn. I turned Sammy in her chair so that she faced me, so that her eyes were at least aligned with mine even if they didn’t seem to see me. I took her ungloved hand in mine.

  “Hey, brat,” I said, and tried to think of what I could say that would reach her. “Remember Fatima. Fight this, for her.”

  Helen said, “Insufficient data.”

  I sighed. “Okay. I—Sammy, do you remember when I first met Fatima? You two—” I stopped. That was just a passing moment. A great moment, but I needed more, to set a trail James Burke Connections style that Sammy could follow back to herself. I leaned back a bit, and took a deep breath. “I remember not long before I was exiled—so you were just shy of twelve going on bratteen—and Grandfather let me, Pete, and Mort each have a friend over for the day. Pete’s friend, Amanda, was just a year older than you, and you followed her around all day, while she followed Petey around.” I chuckled, and shook my head. “Poor Petey. He had no clue that she had a crush on him, and wouldn’t have known what to do if he had.”

  Dawn snorted. “Like you were any better, chasing Heather around all day.”

  “Anyway,” I said to Sammy, “you and Amanda were in the cottage for a while, and then she took off. Pete was mad at you, Amanda seemed mad at you, but nobody dared ask you what happened because you had that look you get, that look that says the first person to speak to you would regret it.

  “Monday, at school, pretty much everyone knew what had happened. You’d tried to kiss her. You beat the crap out of Darren V. for some joke he made about it, and got sent to the principal’s office. Grandfather was not amused, and grounded you for a week. But that night, I snuck my TV into your room, and we stayed up watching old monster movies until the crying Indian finally came on, and you said, ‘I’m never going to cry again, and I’m never going to fall in love. It’s just stupid.’”